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August 2023

Volume 140, Issue #8

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Features

Readers Write

Wind: Essays by readers

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

AJ Muste’s Christian nonviolence

Once a household name among progressives, the activist and minister influenced generations that followed.

by J. Y. Lee

My UCC church’s listening experiment with our evangelical neighbors

I hoped our shared faith would provide enough common ground. I was a bit naive.

by Paul Hopkins

Strange sounds in deep water

In 1958, Frank Watlington was listening for Soviet submarines when he stumbled onto an alien world.

by Liz Charlotte Grant

Interviews

Helping incarcerated men see their own worth

“My goal is to teach men to love themselves,” says Men’s Workshop founder James Enoch Banks, “so they can love others.”

Interview by Philip C. Maurer

The faith leaders who helped preserve abortion access in Kansas

In the fight over an antiabortion amendment, Protestant pastors and Catholic sisters worked to show that there is more than one faith-based view.

by Dawn Araujo-Hawkins

Discerning the body

Bodies get sick. What becomes of a church body when we enact unity at the table while ignoring our brokenness?

by Melissa Florer-Bixler

Getting ultrareal about the church

Ultrarealism, a concept I learned from distance running, begins by seeing things as they really are.

by Martha Tatarnic

Voices

Rachel Mann

Atonement without participation?

In the substitution theory, God simply does stuff for us. What about the relational God of the Bible?

Heidi Neumark

Organizing is about people’s agency

Unlike social services and advocacy, which are all about being helpers

Debie Thomas

Each of my dyings

I’m in a stage of life where I find myself praying the same prayer again and again.

Jonathan Tran

Getting justice and getting it right

Stanley Hauerwas’s The Peaceable Kingdom at 40

Isaac S. Villegas

Nonviolent crisis response in my city

I wish Durham’s HEART program had existed when my friend Joe was killed.

Brian Bantum

Living by kinship, not consumption

When I’m tempted to click “Add to cart,” I hear creation groaning.

Books

Christians should read books

Jessica Hooten Wilson helps us to see reading as a form of holy play.

by Erik Hoeke

An unfolding drama of awakening

John Haught dismantles the impoverished reasoning of most contemporary cosmology.

by Samuel Wells

When a culture’s immune system is compromised

Lyndsey Medford’s beautiful new book looks to interconnectedness amid the diseases of capitalism and injustice.

by Melanie Springer Mock

America the biblical

In a breathtaking scholarly work, Mark Noll explores the doomed experiment of a republic built on an unwritten law of sola scriptura.

by Brad East

We still need books about biblical women’s liberation

Two new ones by Susan Hylen and Nijay Gupta offer correctives many churches have not yet internalized.

by Sally Dyck

Luke Powery preaches through and beyond racism

The Duke Chapel dean writes as if the Holy Spirit makes all the difference for faithful preaching—and anti-racism.

by William H. Willimon

Domestic poverty and who it serves

Matthew Desmond unties the knot of being poor in the US—and shows the rest of us that we hold the strings.

by Tony Tian-Ren Lin

Departments

First Words

The dream and the backlash

Sixty years after the March on Washington, we don’t talk much about how nervous it made White people.

by Peter W. Marty

On Art

Tom Gick Portrait of the artist’s grandmother

At the start of the last century, plenty of artists claimed to be mystics. Theosophy was in the ether, and avant-garde artists routinely spoke of accessing other dimensions, experiencing cosmic visions, or discerning esoteric truths....

by Aaron Rosen

From the Editors

A preventable oil spill in Kansas

Fossil fuel companies aren’t promoting sustainability. They can’t even be trusted to take baseline safety measures.

Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret film still

Screen Time

It’s me, Margaret’s mom

Judy Blume’s gift to the world is her insistence that young people can be trusted as capable moral agents.

by Kathryn Reklis

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