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Dec 6, 2023 | 
uscatholic.org | Nathaniel Hunter |Jessica Mesman
The Advent calendar is one of the few traditions from my Catholic childhood that really took root in my own children’s lives. The Jesse Tree, which I had loved in Catholic school, flopped with my kids—too pedantic for their tastes—and I almost always forget to order purple and pink candles in time for an Advent wreath. But we usually have a few calendars going simultaneously to count the days until Christmas.
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Nov 28, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Allison Meier |Amy Becker |Amy Frykholm |Jessica Mesman
A New York cemetery tour guide and former senior editor of the popular travel site Atlas Obscura, Allison Meier has written what feels like a guidebook to the American grave. Grave—an installment in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons, a series of compact, beautifully designed books about “the hidden life of ordinary things” such as shopping malls, motels, snakes, and blue jeans—is a digestible history and literary tour of American funerary practices, but it’s not just that.
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Aug 9, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Brad East |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman
As our last meetingof an inter-congregational experiment in dialogue was drawing to a close, I felt pleased. The atmosphere was warm and congenial. We’d talked about important subjects and about our most deeply held values in a way that seemed promising for further conversation.
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Aug 8, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman |Brad East
As a young man, at age 26, Paul Simon shared a vision of what it would be like to be old in his song “Old Friends” (with Art Garfunkel): “Can you imagine us / Years from today / Sharing a park bench quietly? / How terribly strange / To be seventy.”Not all visions from youth come true, of course. When Simon was 70, he was not sitting on a park bench quietly. Far from it. He was touring the world, performing songs he had written over a remarkable career spanning over five decades.
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Aug 7, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman |Brad East
In my “sunday’s coming” email for this week, I thought about what Jacob could have done differently to be a better parent. While being a good parent doesn’t guarantee that siblings won’t feel how they feel or make their own choices, being a parent who manipulates emotions and relationships between children definitely doesn’t lead to anything productive or healing. But I’m also taken with the latter segment of this text and the path to Joseph’s enslavement.
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Aug 7, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman |Brad East
On July 17, Russia withdrew from a UN-negotiated deal that would allow Ukraine, the world’s fifth-largest producer of grain, to continue to ship grain out of its Black Sea ports. Russia made it clear that it would consider any Ukrainian ship on the Black Sea fair game for missile strikes, and it started bombing Ukrainian grain infrastructure in Odesa and the Danube river port, including silos full of grain. The result is the threat of food shortages, especially in Africa.
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Aug 7, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman |Brad East
Everything depends upon the voice. Call it whatever: still and small, the crackling thunder in the cloud, the donkey’s intelligible haw, the pause in the center of a hurricane gale. The voice needs no invitation; it will always seek out first contact, whether I welcome it or not. I have felt that treble resonance within my body. If I had to guess, I’d say the voice resides somewhere deeper than my lungs.
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Aug 3, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Jessica Mesman |Martha Tatarnic |Brad East
Forty years ago, Stanley Hauerwas published The Peaceable Kingdom. The instant classic also became a lightning rod for controversy, the book seeming to stand in for Hauerwas’s thorny views on justice—that it is a bad idea, that it cannot be the church’s focus, that rather than “make the world more just” the church should simply “be the church.” This sounded exactly like the kind of luxury afforded those who don’t need justice.
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Aug 2, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Jessica Mesman |Martha Tatarnic |Brian Bantum |Patrick J. Willson
On august 2, 2022, all eyes were on Kansas. Weeks prior, the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, revoking the federal constitutional right to an abortion and clearing the way for Republican-led legislatures to ban abortions at the state level. Now, with an amendment on the ballot that would remove the existing right to an abortion from the state constitution, Kansans were about to be the first voters in a post-Roe nation to weigh in on abortion access.
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Aug 1, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Mark Noll |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman |Libby Howe
“This country is, as everybody knows, a creation of the Bible,” said Solomon Schechter at the dedication of a new building at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary in 1903. The renowned Jewish scholar went on: “The Bible is still holding its own, exercising enormous influence as a real spiritual power, in spite of all the destructive tendencies.”Schechter gave these remarks at almost the exact midpoint between the American founding and the present day. Were they true then? Are they true now?
