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Apr 26, 2024 | 
mdpi.com | Ron Cole-Turner
1. Pushing Back against the Psychedelic RenaissanceSome of the sparkle has faded from the exuberance that so recently surrounded the so-called “psychedelic renaissance.” Beginning around 2022, a series of events and articles has dampened the mood among those who follow all things psychedelic. Advocates are still firmly optimistic about the medical and spiritual benefits of psychedelics, but their optimism is more cautious and guarded than it was just a few years ago.
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Jan 24, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Elizabeth Evans |Peter W. Marty |Ron Cole-Turner |Benjamin Dueholm
Moses has always been a special figure in my life. I like to think of him as the patron saint of in-between things. He is a child of Israel, nursed by his own mother, falling asleep to the songs of her God, hearing the hum of her prayers in his bones as he feels her chest rise and fall—it’s just enough for him to know there is something of Hebrew life in him, that in some way they are his people. But he doesn’t know the name of their God, nor can he form complex thoughts in their tongue.
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Jan 23, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Elizabeth Evans |Peter W. Marty |Ron Cole-Turner |Benjamin Dueholm
Welcome to Madang. Madang is the outdoor living room of the world. Here, we invite you to sit and tune into unreserved, remarkable conversations with renowned authors, leaders, public figures, and scholars on religion, culture, and everything in between. Here in the 36th episode of Madang, I converse with David P. Gushee about his new book, Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, Atlanta, Georgia.
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Jan 23, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Elizabeth Evans |Peter W. Marty |Ron Cole-Turner |Benjamin Dueholm
(Century illustration | Source image by David Griffiths on Unsplash) I spend my days thinking and writing and teaching about purpose. I’m a theologian, so officially I think and write and teach about God and God-related things. But I understand my vocation as having made the choice to live inside the question, So what? The world is here, and so am I, and so are you. So what? This is the realm of theology.
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Jan 19, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Ron Cole-Turner |Peter W. Marty |Benjamin Dueholm |Philip Jenkins
I practiced the word over and over, a vosotros form of beber that looms over the Spanish version of the words of institution. Despite my preparation, when I hold up the cup I stumble over this form, rarely used in Spanish conversation: “Haced esto todas las veces que la bebáis.” Laura smiles at me, a shared look of amusement and compassion.
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Jan 11, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Paul Harding |Ron Cole-Turner |Peter W. Marty |Benjamin Dueholm
Violent storms often mark turning points in epic narratives. King Lear staggers across a windswept heath, bemoaning the loss of his kingdom and his mind. Battered by a hurricane in the Florida Everglades, Zora Neale Hurston’s characters shelter in their flimsy shanties; “they seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” Storms pummel the Yorkshire moors when a spurned Heathcliff runs from the house of his beloved in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
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Jan 9, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Keenan Norris |Ron Cole-Turner |Peter W. Marty |Benjamin Dueholm
Chi Boy is in style and in form a pastiche, with the city of Chicago as its axis mundi. Keenan Norris presents Chicago as both the existential and the historical touchstone for the composite American that is the Black man, from Richard Wright to Jeff Fort to Barack Obama to those who died young either in the city or in deep connection with it: Emmett Till, Yummy Sandifer, and even a young Black woman, Hadiya Pendleton.
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Oct 3, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Naomi Oreskes |Erik Conway |Ron Cole-Turner |William Schultz
The story of the long-standing fight between our nation’s economic conservatives and progressives can be told at varying levels of outrage. Here’s a low-level version: in the 1800s, the federal government neglected Americans facing poverty and harsh working conditions, but the next century brought an explosion in federal interventions.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Javier Zamora |Ron Cole-Turner |Steve Thorngate |Mac Loftin
In December 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic and a month before Joe Biden was inaugurated, I visited the Arizona-Mexico border to learn about the border wall that the Trump administration was building and how it was impacting immigration policy. My guide was Father Neeley, a Jesuit priest who works for a migrant relief organization based in Nogales, a town that spans the border.
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Sep 26, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Mac Loftin |Steve Thorngate |Alejandra Oliva |Ron Cole-Turner
I’m a longtime aficionado of horror fiction, and I was floored by Kier-La Janisse’s staggeringly ambitious 2021 documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. In its three-plus-hours running time, the film offers a sweeping survey of the genre of folk horror, touching on 200 films from all parts of the world.
