by Corey Parish
A persistent theme throughout Bonhoeffer’s works is the need for a humble posture towards one another. In Life Together, he famously wrote, “God did not make this person as I would have made him…
by Claudia May
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In her recording of the song, “Flattery Will Get You Everywhere,” country singer Lynn Anderson mines various facets of flattery. She acknowledges that if someone utters unkind words, her mind “would soon close from ear to ear.” But if a suitor or acquaintance flatters her, she devours their words and “lick[s] the platy clean . . . so starved” is she for “pretty words [that] are ever insincere.” She is cognizant of the calculating traits of flattery, but she does not seem to care because she thrives on the attention flattery offers. Emboldened by the charisma of flattery, she tells her flatterer to “brag [her] up” because “flattery will get you everywhere.” The back note of these lyrics suggests that the one being flattered is a co-conspirator, a willing accomplice to flattery’s devious and perhaps not-so-devious ways. …
by Laura N. Van Dyke
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When I encountered my first Charles Williams novel in an undergraduate class fifteen years ago, I wasn’t sure what I had just read but knew I wanted more. So I went to the campus library and checked out his other six novels. A week later I had read them all, and while I didn’t know then that I would go on to spend almost a decade working on a PhD involving Williams’s writing, I knew that something about his view of the world had changed mine.…
by Jim Friedrich
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I first met David and Susan at the California Shape Note Convention in January 2000. They introduced themselves at the lunch break. After hearing my opening prayer that morning, they suspected we were kindred spirits. We quickly discovered a multitude of common bonds, including creative liturgy, filmmaking, music, theater and dance, theology, and radical Christianity.…
by Greg Spencer
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Power is seductive. Every dictator, elected president, and guru has felt the tug to get his or her own way at the expense of others. Did Jesus? We know he was tempted as we are. Think how easy it would have been for him to say to the Pharisees, "Shut up and get out of the way," or to the disciples, "You dopes! No one obeys less than you do." But he did not abuse his persuasive power.…
by Arthur Aghajanian
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Resurrection does not only apply to the body of Jesus. It is the cosmic pattern of life. In every death there is a transformation, and when suffering leads us to God we are born anew, just as it was with Jesus after his crucifixion. As an eternal process, there is no separation between incarnation, death, and renewal.…
by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson
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George MacDonald (mentor of C.S. Lewis; inspiration of G.K. Chesterton, Madeleine L’Engle, and so many more) loved to celebrate Christmas – and necessarily for him part of that celebration was to pull others into the celebrating. He did this in person by feasting and festivities, charades and theater, story and song; by decorating his children’s walls and caroling with them through the streets; by inviting strangers into his home for all of the above, sometimes in groups of a hundred or more!…
by Christopher Myers
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Advent is a season of hopeful expectation, but also a season of penance and preparation, a season when that madman John the Baptist bursts on the scene to level mountains and raise up valleys, crying out for the world to repent so that paths might be made straight for the One who is our hope to come. Advent means coming; it does not mean arriving.…
by Ruth T. West
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In all honesty, I’m not really sure anymore how to pray from day to day. I know the obvious topics. They are mostly the same in any situation. I pray……
by Salim J. Munayer
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I was about to enter my house when a neighbor stopped me and pointed to my Christmas tree, visible through the window. He said, “Your Christmas tree is offensive to……
When former Campus Crusade staff member Jack Sparks and an eclectic team of folks who called themselves, rather boldly, the “Christian World Liberation Front” considered how to best present the good news of Jesus on the campus of UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, one of the means they chose was a Christian adaptation of the street papers that had become part and parcel of student unrest across the country.…