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September 8, 2021

Volume 138, Issue #18
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Features

How My Mind Has Changed

An epidemic of moral injury

Christians have an opportunity to transform a faith that has fueled genocide, slavery, war, and kleptocracy.

by Rita Nakashima Brock

Beauty from ugliness on the US-Mexico border

Presbyterian border ministry in Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora

by David A. Hoekema

Interviews

Judaism scholar Susannah Heschel on her father’s legacy

“How does a political gesture become a moment of prayer?”

Elizabeth Palmer interviews Susannah Heschel

Author Walter Wangerin’s many lives and words

Those of us who worked with him sometimes suspected he had cloned himself.

by Frederick Niedner

crucifix in front of stained glass

Willimon and Hauerwas’s out-of-season words on pastoral care

Pastors coping with the pandemic need our encouragement, not our carping.

by Beverly R. Gaventa

crucifix in front of stained glass

Pastoral care is part of Christian formation

A response to Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas

by Maria Russell Kenney

Books

Sludge, sludge everywhere

Cass Sunstein explores the things that waste our precious time.

by LaVonne Neff

Do millennials bring something new to leadership?

Three authors, one Jewish, one Muslim, and one Christian, place their hope firmly in a new generation—again.

by Jason A. Poling

What if forgiveness were unthinkable?

Paul Kahn’s memoir of his family is a cautionary mirror for our cultural moment.

by James K. A. Smith

A male scholar looks at the Bible’s women

According to James McGrath, unless Jesus was able to learn from others, he wasn’t truly human.

by Sally Dyck

Departments

First Words

I walked across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and saw a synagogue

Visiting Temple Mishkan Israel

by Peter W. Marty

Faith Matters

Jesus the poet

We are invited to bring the rich resources of our senses and imaginations into the realm of faith.

by Debie Thomas

Screen Time

My pandemic obsession with workplace comedies

Mythic Quest and Call My Agent have me feeling nostalgic for annoying colleagues and pointless meetings.

by Kathryn Reklis

On Art

Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Ávila, Theodidacts, by Jodi Simmons

Schooled in Eastern Orthodox art, Jodi Simmons offers an iconographic variation on Italian Renaissance “holy conversation” imagery, in which saints from different eras are shown gathered around sacred figures like the Madonna and Child, as if hold...

art selection and comment by John Kohan

From the Editors

US climate action at last?

Congress may finally be poised to do something, though not enough.

News

People

Christian ethicist Donald W. Shriver Jr. dies at 93

Donald W. Shriver Jr., an acclaimed Christian ethicist and Presbyterian minister who wrote widely about the need for White Americans to face and repent of their racist past, died July 28 at 93....

by Yonat Shimron

People

Influential Orthodox leader Leonid Kishkovsky dies at 78

Leonid Kishkovsky, who came to the United States as a childhood refugee from war-torn Poland and later became a leader in cross-church cooperation and the first Eastern Orthodox president of the National Council of Churches, has died....
People

Beverly Shamana, pioneering Methodist bishop, dies at 81

Beverly Shamana, the second Black woman to become a bishop in the United Methodist Church, died August 1. She was 81 and died of complications from Parkinson’s disease, said Yvonne Williams Boyd, a California chaplain and close friend....

by Sam Hodges

AME Church returns to Cuba after 51 years

After more than half a century, the African Methodist Episcopal Church has reestablished a presence in Cuba....

Study: Gen Z doubles down on combining tarot and traditional faith

A new survey released by Springtide Research Institute confirms what metaphysical store owners and veteran tarot readers have known since the term Gen Z was invented: younger Americans, known for fashioning their own spirituality the way they cura...

by Heather Greene

Rebel constables help tenants stay in their homes during COVID

On a warm November afternoon, Kristen Randall, a red-haired woman in a blue button-down shirt, knocked at the door of a rundown apartment in Tucson’s East Midtown neighborhood....

by Gabbriel Schivone

Valpo drops ‘Crusaders’ team name

Valparaiso University announced on August 10 that it has adopted the Beacons as its new team name, replacing the Crusaders, a term school officials dropped this year after saying it had been embraced by hate groups....

Jackie Robinson’s Methodist faith

Besieged by death threats, racial abuse, and physical danger, somehow Jackie Robinson never publicly lost his composure during the 1947 Major League Baseball season, when he integrated the league....

by Jim Patterson

Lectionary

September 26, Ordinary 26B (James 5:13–20)

I regularly pray for things that are unlikely to come about quickly, if at all.

by Nanette Sawyer

September 19, Ordinary 25B (Proverbs 31:10–31)

Does a good woman give and give and give without thought to her own well-being?

by Nanette Sawyer

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