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What are supply clergy? Are they merely ordained persons who are authorized to use the costume, magic words and hand motions needed to legitimize  an hour of worship while the life of the congregation goes along without them quite well, thank you very much?

New today from the Century.

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."

The thing about serving as a prophet is that you are forever stuck between what God wants and what the people want.

If my pastor got up some Sunday and said, "I am not a pastor. I'm just a regular person," I'd respond like this: "Well, we hired you to be a pastor, and if you have a problem with it you should find another line of work."

The gospel is the good news that Christ's death and resurrection--mediated through scripture, tradition, and the sacraments of the church--offers new life for all who embrace it.

New today from the Century.

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.

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?

I often feel that my whole time in ministry has been one when the word of the Lord is rare and visions not widespread.