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Mar 15, 2024 | 
religionnews.com | William Schultz |Rizki Fauzi
(Sightings) — Calling a book “timely” feels like a backhanded compliment. It seems to suggest that the book’s greatest strength is its publication date. So let me be clear: Sarah McCammon’s “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church” is both timely and superb. Timely, because it deals with the issues that will decide the 2024 elections — issues of religious power and bodily autonomy.
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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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Jul 12, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Julian DeShazier |Chad Martin |William Schultz |Amy Frykholm
Earlier this year, Southern Baptists expelled five churches from the nation’s largest Protestant denomination for having women as pastors. Now, the leader of a fellowship of Black Southern Baptist pastors wonders if their churches will be next.
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Jul 12, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Julian DeShazier |Chad Martin |William Schultz |Amy Frykholm
The origin story of my pacifism will be familiar to many Americans my age. I was 23 years old on September 11, 2001. I had grown up firmly middle-class and had lived, up to that point, in relatively small, safe places in Louisiana and Arkansas. I had not imagined that violence was a part of my everyday existence until the door to my 8 a.m. seminary class opened and we were commanded to turn on the television. Suddenly the distance between my college town and the world shortened.
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Jul 11, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Julian DeShazier |Chad Martin |William Schultz |Amy Frykholm
Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) was an English novelist with views that were mystical and (eventually) Anglo-Catholic, and moreover passionately feminist. A prolific and once very popular writer who addressed wildly diverse, often daring topics, many of her novels deserve rereading. But one brilliant book in particular clamors for rediscovery. For many years, Macaulay was chiefly known for one comic novel, the delicious Middle Eastern travelogue The Towers of Trebizond (1956).
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Jul 10, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Julian DeShazier |Chad Martin |William Schultz |Amy Frykholm
The 13th-century scottish priest John Duns Scotus was one of the first to articulate the scandal of particularity. He argued that true relationship between God and humans is only possible in the specific and concrete. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to love concepts, ideals, and generalities. Most Christians speak of the scandal of particularity in reference to the doctrine of incarnation. But it also comes up in discourse around the chosenness of God’s people through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
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Jul 10, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Julian DeShazier |Chad Martin |William Schultz |Amy Frykholm
As the founder of the Forgiveness Project I’ve spent nearly 20 years talking to people about what forgiveness means—in terms of both its indisputable transformative power but also about the obstacles and resistance that people face when attempting to forgive. In these conversations I’ve discovered that one thing seems to be hardest of all: forgiving ourselves. I’ve long been interested in the corrosive power of regret.
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Jul 7, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Chad Martin |Julian DeShazier |William Schultz |Amy Frykholm
To receive these posts by email each Monday, sign up. For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century. Biblical scholars make clear that verses 28–30 of Matthew 11—the heart of this pericope and one of the most tender, soothing passages in Scripture—is about sabbath.
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Jul 7, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Julian DeShazier |William Schultz |Chad Martin |Amy Frykholm
When Georgia O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1929, she spent a month at the Taos ranch of novelist D. H. Lawrence. For portions of each day, she lay down on an old bench beneath a large ponderosa pine. In an interview years later, O’Keeffe spoke warmly of that bench where she daydreamed and soaked in the sky. Her early painting The Lawrence Tree, depicting stars poking through the tree’s branches at night, is now in the permanent collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Connecticut.
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Jul 6, 2023 | 
christiancentury.org | Julian DeShazier |William Schultz |Chad Martin |Amy Frykholm
I think of myself as a snail and not a squirrel: I don’t accumulate things, dwell on photos or messages or memories from the past, or linger over decisions made or mistakes that can’t be reversed. Still, recently I decided it was time to downsize: too many books, too many paper files, too much of the past to see the present or perceive the future. Turns out if you’re going to be an accredited snail, you don’t simply need not to hoard—you must actively jettison.
