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1 week ago | 
christiancentury.org | Mac Loftin |Isaac S. Villegas |Jesse Hake |Cait West
The card holders on the long dining room table offered guidance to the women assembled around it: “Keep it Constitutional” and “Keep it Kind.” With those themes in mind, about 10 women, using beige or light blue fabric pieces and colorful markers, sat down to craft messages to their state representative or senator: “Checks and balances are vital to protect the power of Congress.” “We the People” “Rule of law for all” “Everyone deserves due process” Their 10×10 fabric pieces were later...
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1 month ago | 
christiancentury.org | Heather McTeer Toney |Mac Loftin |Brandon Ambrosino |Isaac S. Villegas
“How in the world are Black folks supposed to talk about climate change when we have other pressing issues to deal with? How and better yet, why?” Heather McTeer Toney’s opening questions cut to the chase: How is climate change relevant to Black Americans who already face daily challenges to survival? In a nation where every Black family knows the stakes of getting home before the streetlights come on, this is a legitimate question.
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Jan 27, 2025 | 
christiancentury.org | Mac Loftin |Brian Bantum |Brandon Ambrosino |Isaac S. Villegas
My church’s order of worship includes a time to ask for prayer. During a service several months ago, as people passed the microphone from row to row for congregants to make their requests, I decided to raise my hand for a turn to share. I’d been suffering from a health condition that baffled doctors. I spoke up to ask my community to pray for me. There, as part of our worship, my community held my concerns in their prayers, entrusting my well-being into God’s care. We need each other.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Victoria Barnett |Jack Jenkins |Aleja Hertzler- McCain |Isaac S. Villegas
Buried in the foreword to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” the not-quite-disavowed blueprint for the incoming Trump administration, is a strange reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “Open-borders activism,” the document declares, is “a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace.’” Bonhoeffer is then invoked to denounce other excesses of the left, such as environmental extremism and insufficient hostility to China.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
anabaptistworld.org | Isaac S. Villegas
Gratitude is the life-giving pulse of our faith. The oldest name given to our practice of gathering and eating at the Lord’s table — the Eucharist — is taken from a Greek word, eucharisteo, which means “I give thanks.”The Apostle Paul uses this word in 1 Corinthians 11, the passage we use as our Words of Institution when we celebrate Communion: “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said . .
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Jun 28, 2024 | 
anabaptistworld.org | Isaac S. Villegas
In Luke 15, Jesus tells a parable that centers on an impatient son — the prodigal, as we’ve come to call him — who demands his inheritance while his father lives. The son will get the money when his father dies. But the son can’t wait. So he asks his father if they could just assume, for the sake of the payout, that he’s dead. The son values his father not as a person but as a bank account. Though the father has no obligation to do this, he agrees. This is the father’s first act of generosity.
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May 22, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | William H. Willimon |Javier Viera |Nicolette Manglos-Weber |Isaac S. Villegas
I have a tear gas canister on my shelf. Already detonated, of course. A friend from the Lajee Center at Aida Camp, a refugee camp just outside Bethlehem, gave it to me during a 2016 visit. We were walking back to the center after lunch. Kids were playing soccer in the quiet road that runs alongside the wall separating olive groves on the other side from cramped housing units on this side, the wall that segregates the state of Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories.
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May 21, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | William H. Willimon |Julian DeShazier |Isaac S. Villegas |Robert Saler
In Mark 14, the scene is tense. Jesus stands before an assembly of the high priest, all the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes. False witnesses rise and tell tales meant to condemn Jesus, but their accounts don’t add up. So the high priest asks Jesus a pointed question: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” Jesus says. At this, the high priest tears his clothes and accuses Jesus of blasphemy. The assembly agrees and condemns Jesus to death for it.
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May 20, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | William H. Willimon |Julian DeShazier |Isaac S. Villegas |Robert Saler
This famous encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus features a haunting interplay of freedom and destiny. On the one hand, the exchange contains one of the Bible’s more vivid pneumatological descriptions: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.
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May 20, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | William H. Willimon |Julian DeShazier |Isaac S. Villegas |Robert Saler
About 10 years ago, when the state of Pennsylvania passed a law requiring a background check for anyone who worked with children, Megan Benninger volunteered to help her church comply. At the time, Benninger and her husband were members of a small Southern Baptist Church, where the nursery was run by volunteers and things were a bit disorganized. “Everything was loosey-goosey,” she said.
