-
Jan 3, 2025 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan
Churches don’t close because they lose their vision (or fulfill it), and they don’t close when they get too small. Churches close their doors when they run out of money. Often the demise of a congregation is dressed up in other language, but the cold hard fact is that churches close when they run out of cold hard cash.
-
Dec 6, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan |Sarah Sanderson
The most jarring pages in The Black Reparations Project are filled almost exclusively with numbers.A table is headed with the dry title “Annual Total Debt Estimates and Cumulative Debt Estimates at 3% Interest, 1776–1860” and dull column labels like “Hourly Wage,” “Person-hours per year,” “Annual total debt,” and “Cumulative debt at 3% interest.” The rest of the space, spilling across more than two pages, is bursting with digits, harrowing digits that represent the wages American enslavers...
-
Dec 6, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan |Paul Griffiths
Picture longing for an inaccessible, distant place. Call that longing farsickness. It is in form the same as homesickness, but it lacks the emphasis on memory. The homesick are exiles who remember somewhere they once were and would like to return to. They include Ovid at the Black Sea, Genji in Suma, and Vladimir Nabokov wandering the USA. They are nostalgic for paradise lost. They look back. The farsick differ only in being anticipatory rather than nostalgic.
-
Jul 2, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan |John Shelton
In a sense, Massachusetts Bay Colony was North America’s first parachurch ministry. According to its 1629 charter, “The principal end of this plantation” was to “win and incite the natives . . .
-
Jul 2, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan |Andrew Arndt
Everybody keeps telling me that the church is dying. I keep wondering if we know what that means. A few Sundays ago, we baptized a whole mess of folks in the church where I pastor. One of them was a teenage girl with whom our family has become close. We’re quite fond of her. Her parents might identify as Christians, but they haven’t attended church or raised her with any faith practices. Then, one Sunday a couple of years back, the Spirit started stirring the waters.
-
Jul 2, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan |Myles Werntz
In the world before the global pandemic, the question of digital church was relegated to futurists and megachurches, to church planters–cum–app developers. Without a doubt this question of digital church was already too late, though. By the time that 2020 happened, it was no longer a question of whether digital church would become normalized but of how rapidly that normalization would unfold and transform the church. I come to this question as a skeptic and a realist.
-
Jul 2, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan |Paul R. Hoard
Over the past couple of decades, the board game industry has exploded. Game-related stores, cafes, bars, and conventions have been popping up all over the world, and the game industry produced about $18 billion in revenue for 2022, a number that is expected to steadily rise.[1] Although this growth can be analyzed from many different angles, I’m most interested in the psychology behind what happens when we play.
-
Jul 2, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan |Scott MacDougall
In the post-Christian, postsecular Global North, people inside and outside of Christian communities look around and observe shrinking membership in churches across the denominational spectrum. Christians and non-Christians alike notice the world keeps on turning even as their local churches dwindle, consolidate, or close. They see the intensifying polarization and politicization of Christian commitments. They identify abuses of pastoral and political power by church leaders.
-
Jul 2, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan
It was a river. No,it was a stream. Or perhapsit was a spring that flowedfrom a mountain, becauseit was so clear, and everyonewanted to drink. In the distance,there was a church with manylights starting from one light. There is a story about the lightthat had to do with a sailorand how the light appearedon the hill of stone. So a church was built. And upthe 114 steps the villagers gofor mass and the tourists go forredemption. They pass each otherwith a smile or a nod on the way upand down.
-
Jul 2, 2024 | 
theotherjournal.com | Kait Dugan |Richard Spilman
Wave of the priestly hand,and the lights slowly dim. “Sin,” he says, “is darkness,though what seems so darkto us is but a shadowof the greater gloomwe’re too naive to see. Its waters close round,and the grace we breathelike air departs as we drown.”His words weary me. I don’t need a shadow playto conjure up the murkten thousand metersfrom the sun’s quickening heat.
