"Theology is a place and a story.

The Hebrew Bible displays a complicated attitude toward cities. Much of the story tells of a rural, agrarian society, yet those stories were written by people living in urban environments. Moreover, cities frequently appear in a negative light; the Hebrew slaves in the book of Exodus were forced to build cities, and the book of Samuel’s critique of monarchy assumes an urban setting that supports that monarchy.

Amidst the bright lights and wrappings of a sentimentally saturated Christmas season, we tend to forget about the gritty, messy reality of the Advent story as it was experienced 2,000 years ago. In this honest Advent devotional, best-selling progressive Christian author John Pavlovitz reminds us that God came to meet us in the low places of our lives -- and that Jesus continues to come low this Advent season.

A child's laugh should be the butterfly wing, the ripple-maker, for all the world. There are many children crying. We hear them echoing from news media. It is time to pray the change of the world in children's laughter. More than one hundred themes and issues crucial to hope and justice were crowd-sourced to create this collaborative anthology of fifty-two reflections from seventy-seven writers in eleven different countries.