guilt

Martin Luther went looking for God—and found Christ on the cross.

Thirty years later my petty crime came back to haunt me.

The GOP congressman has sent nearly 12,000 letters to Americans whose loved ones died in the war he voted to authorize.

When Sean O'Callaghan joined the IRA, nationalism was his religion. Later he saw how it poisoned his soul.

We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “indulgence.”

In her memoir, comedian Maggie Rowe lays bare a struggle with excessive guilt that rivals Martin Luther’s.

The current issue of the Century features a remembrance by my mother of my grandfather’s terrifying war experience and its unfolding consequences. Tomorrow the world marks the 70th anniversary of V-E Day, when the world-shaping trauma of the war halted in Europe. My grandfather’s story is only a tiny fragment of the war, his decades of agony only a ripple in its billowing aftershocks. But it is the kind of story that is easily lost as the war recedes from living memory.

It is a subtle shift that we make in our liturgy and preaching. But it’s an important one. We do terrible things and we must confess our action. But we are good. We are made in the image of God. And in Jesus Christ, we are forgiven people.

We may have the power and privilege to avoid having to work in a sweatshop. But we feel powerless to prevent such horrors from existing.

Our teacher cautions us that the corpse pose is the most difficult of all yoga postures to master, but after an hour’s exertion in warrior pose, downward-facing dog and cobra, the prospect of relaxing horizontally on one’s yoga mat brings both relief and the impertinent question, “How hard can it be?” Fascinated, I report to my husband, “Every day at the conclusion of yoga class we practice dying.” “That’s interesting,” he says, trying to share my enthusiasm. “It’s kind of like Lent,” I venture. "Lent is when we’re supposed to practice dying, right?”

In the Bible, the ambiguity of shame is unmistakable.

What actually happened in the encounter between Western missionaries and non-Christian peoples?