Features
Your kid or mine? Reaching troubled youth: Reaching troubled youth
The movie Thirteen does not represent every teen’s story, but it does show every parent’s nightmare. It’s the story of an angry girl. Tracy (played by Evan Rachel Wood) is angry at her well-meaning mother, Mel (played by Holly Hunter), whose harried life as a single parent makes her resort too often to responses like, “We’ll discuss this later.” Tracy is angry that her father has abandoned her and that her mother is getting back together with her drug-addicted boyfriend.
Power outage: When leaders don't lead
What happens when power is seen as inherently suspect and even evil? What happens when power in the church is viewed as bad? What are the implications for the church when its leaders eschew power and influence and consider them qualities or capacities to be avoided?
This past summer I taught a course at a seminary in Canada. Forty people showed up for “Pastoral Leadership for Congregational Transformation.” Most were pastors of the United Church of Canada, with a little leaven from other church bodies, including Anglican and Lutheran.
Jet lag
The bedazzling first neon shots of Tokyo in Lost in Translation suggest a topsy-turvy version of Manhattan-weirdly familiar and yet alien, denser, even more vertiginous. Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a middle-aged movie star who's been flown to Japan to shoot a series of whiskey commercials, stares out the window of his cab and blinks through his jet-lag haze.
Voices
Barbara Brown Taylor
Where the Bible leads me: On homosexuality
During the fourth century, at the height of the Arian controversy in Constantinople, one Christian wrote that it was impossible to go into a bakery for a loaf of bread without debating the nature of Christ. Was he the eternal Son of the eternal Father or was there a time when he was not? With bishops physically assaulting other bishops over this question and emperors changing sides on a regular basis, the debate spilled out of the church into the streets, where the Athanasians favored passages from John’s Gospel and the Arians shot back with passages from Mark.