"It feels vulnerable to be the weird lady outside preaching sermons."
homelessness
Faced with someone trying to deny me shelter from the rain, I thought, are you kidding?
At home in exile
In a time of American inhospitality, Jan Holton offers a compelling vision.
What’s a miracle? How can we (frail human creatures that we are!) separate contingency—what’s possible but unpredictable, an event that seems unlikely or unintended—from miracle?
In The Lady in the Van, viewers see playwright Alan Bennett befriend a woman experiencing homelessness—and treat her as a human.
I grew up around art and a few artists. I looked to people who had a reverence for the world at large. A natural contemplative awareness developed, as in many children before it is covered over. Call it awe, which Abraham Heschel describes as an “intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.” No wonder I became both a photographer and an Episcopal deacon.
One day, a soup-kitchen guest named what was happening: church, a worshiping community distinct from the larger congregation.
Imagine you're walking through a big city and you see a homeless person. You have several options.
In discussions of poverty’s ills and cures, it doesn’t take long for the subject of root causes to come up. Not everyone agrees what those root causes are, of course—or whose fault they are. But it’s often taken for granted that you can’t just tackle a presenting problem directly; you have to go for the root, whatever it is. This certainly isn’t always wrong, but it does have a way of obscuring simple, obvious solutions.
A particular verse of scripture has been haunting me lately. I hear it as an indictment of an aspect of my personal life. First, it was a lectionary text in Epiphany. Then I found it in the unifying passage of a devotional book I read. “Bring the homeless poor into your house,” we read in Isaiah 58:7, part of a passage on genuine fasting.