When clergy meet regularly in a "community of practice," they find that trust develops, anxieties diminish, and challenges turn into occasions for learning.
Impulsively, I e-mailed three other clergywomen and invited them to participate in a writing group. Their responses came quickly and enthusiastically: Yes. I'm in. I need this.
Newt Gingrich has suggested that undocumented immigrants who are family-loving, hardworking, tax-paying, churchgoing and deeply rooted should stay here. This is pretty much the typical immigrant.
Everyone wants my opinion these days: airlines, hotels, Amazon. How healthy can it be to think of life as a series of episodes to rate up or down?
Since the years of Reagan and Thatcher, we have heard a steady drumbeat about the limitations of government. But what about the limitations of the free market?
A Little History of Philosophy, by Nigel Warburton
Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer for Britain's Open University, a service originated by the BBC to provide education via television to adults who had not gone on to higher education. A Little History of Philosophy is focused on that audience and on anyone else who knows little about philosophy except that it is, as Warburton says, "impenetrable and obscure."
Aftershocks
Paul Farmer has a keen sense of the tendency to portray Haitians as helpless victims. This is well evident in his poignant chronicle of the year that began with the January 2010 earthquake.
Neither Calendar nor Clock, by Piet J. Naudé
In the long struggle for freedom in South Africa, parts of the church played a major role, even as other parts colluded with the apartheid regime. Few actions in that struggle were more important than the Belhar Confession.
Lutheran Slogans, by Robert W. Jenson
Slogans are necessary, Jenson says, both for practical reasons (we need shortcuts in arguments) and rhetorical ones (we need vivid ways of summing up a position). But problems arise when slogans become "untethered from the complex of ideas and practices which they once evoked."
Like Crazy
Like Crazy is a love story about an American boy (Anton Yelchin) and an English girl (Felicity Jones) who meet in their final year of college in Los Angeles, fall in love and opt to spend the summer together in the States before she returns to London.
War Horse
War Horse is ideal material for Steven Spielberg. His adaptation of the children's novel by Michael Morpurgo comes to the screen by way of the celebrated National Theatre stage version, which has been entrancing audiences of all ages on Broadway since last season.