The Christian Century

Three times a year, a worship service ends and I go back to the vesting room to change—and I feel as though I'm walking into a time warp.

On Easter Sunday, Jake Tapper interviewed Rick Warren on ABC’s This Week, asking the influential pastor a series of questions on faith and politics. Of particular interest were his comments on soldiers and war (which did not make it into the aired segment but are available here). At the end of the interview, Warren exclaimed, “God hates war, but loves every soldier.”   As a combat veteran, I was impressed by and grateful for Warren’s statement. The Bible makes clear that war is at best a necessary evil--the idea at the core of the just war tradition. And yes: God loves each and every soldier. But I want to look more closely at the latter thought, especially in light of the suicide epidemic that currently afflicts our nation’s veterans and soldiers.

The Century's sort-by-lectionary-day tool exists primarily as a way of organizing past Living by the Word columns and Blogging toward Sunday posts in a useful way. But we also put other content there--anything from the magazine or blogs that happens to deal with a given lection in a way that could plausibly be useful to a preacher or worship planner. So, while our lectionary columnists and bloggers mostly focus on Sundays, the lectionary pages have also collected a good bit of content related to the additional holy days of the (weekly) lectionary.