vulnerability
God-as-parent is a radical metaphor
It’s not possible to parent without experiencing risk, weakness, pain, and transformation.
What does the cross mean for people with disabilities?
David McLachlan proposes a participatory atonement in which God engages creation’s contingency and vulnerability.
My brother is an essential worker at a grocery store
I wish we actually valued his dangerous work.
The pandemic didn’t make our food system vulnerable
It always has been—because vulnerability is part of creation.
The strange, humbling ritual of foot washing
It makes me uncomfortable. That’s by design.
L’Arche’s values of accompaniment, vulnerability, and mutuality are bigger than Jean Vanier
Such values have shadow sides. They are also desperately needed in the world.
Disability and the good life
Theologian Shane Clifton rethinks virtue ethics from his wheelchair.
What if Jesus came back as a college sophomore?
I posed this question to the students in my sexual ethics class.
Anne Lamott, Ernest Hemingway, and a Gospel writer commiserate about revelation and disclosure
Who I'd invite to my writers' dinner party
Vulnerability and readability
Do women have to trade intimacy for trust in ways that men do not? If we do, should we stop? Are we playing into stereotypes? Are we inviting people to take us less seriously?
The mystery of the beautiful
How can God speak through what is soft and breakable? How can we?
God in weakness
Elizabeth Gandolfo's first book is not just an anthropology. Its more daring and abidingly important gift is a statement about God.
Divine contractions: Gods labor, our deliverance
Isaiah doesn't politely, abstractly compare God to a mother giving birth. The text suggests that God squats and pants and bellows like a moose.
Open to transformation
Kristine A. Culp has produced a sophisticated, original and timely work
of constructive theology. It also happens to be a great story—even a
page-turner.
How safe can we be?
Unlike in previous eras, when the majority of our risks came from natural sources, today the majority of our risks are "manufactured." We humans create them.
Fear of flying: Shared vulnerability
I recently flew with my family from Tel Aviv to Boston via Rome. The day was full of long lines, bomb-sniffing dogs, the opening and searching of overfull suitcases and the struggles to close them up again. In Rome, every single person on our flight was patted down and searched. We must have shown our passports 20 times.Impromptu debates arose as people from all over the world waited in line together. Was it better to search for the explosive device, as the Americans do, or for the bomber, as the Israelis do? Do the airlines need better technology or better training in behavioral screening? Has the war on terror made us more safe or less?