For Christians, resistance is written right into our baptismal vows. Following Christ means resisting oppression and evil wherever we might find it. Doing that work requires us to first rise up, face our fears, and cultivate courage that can sustain us for the journey.
We know that the earliest Christians sang hymns. Paul encourages believers to sing "psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs." And at the dawn of the second century the Roman official Pliny names a feature of Christian worship as "singing alternately a hymn to Christ as to God." But are some of these early Christian hymns preserved for us in the New Testament? Are they right before our eyes? New Testament scholars have long debated whether early Christian hymns appear in the New Testament.
In order to engage the Bible in the spirit of justice, compassion, and love, Jonathan L. Walton suggests reading the Bible in its world for our world. Perfect for individual or group study, A Lens of Love helps Christians to read and interpret the Bible morally and confidently as they engage society's pressing issues.
The poor will always be with you, Jesus said – but that doesn’t mean Christians have ever figured out how to be with the poor.
Pope Francis has emphasized a vision of a “Church that is poo
Miracles are not confined to the stories of Scripture; these signs of God's presence and power in creation are experienced throughout our daily existence. Yet cultural challenges and modernity's skepticism have marginalized belief in them as unreasonable and irrational, says Luke Timothy Johnson.
In The New Testament, Jericho Brown continues his tender examination of race, masculinity, and sexuality. These poems bear witness to survival in the face of brutality, while also elegizing two brothers haunted by shame, two lovers hounded by death, and an America wounded by war and numbered by religion. Brown summons myth, fable, and fairytale not to merely revise the Bible -- more so to write the kind of lyric poetry we find at the source of redemption -- for the profane and for the sacred.
It's the sort of experience familiar to many: Somewhere between illness and divorce, abusive relationships and brushes with death, faith failed to provide answers . . . or we failed to live as though we believed faith held answers. But surely, it's different for clergy, the ones who preach and practice faith? But faith requires more, and authors Martha Spong and Rachel G.
In this book Adam Hearlson argues that Christians can say a holy “no” to oppression and injustice through the church’s worship practices. “To speak the holy no,” Hearlson says, “is to refuse to be complicit in the oppression and violence of the ruling power. It is the courageous critique of the present and its claims of immutability.”
God's love for us breaks every boundary. So should our love for each other.
LITERACY
UNDERSTANDING
DIALOGUE
