Features
When the demon takes over
Etched in flesh
Trauma at the tomb
For Mark, Easter begins in trembling
Essays by readers: Twilight
Formed for solidarity
The lives of wild seeds
Voices
Alejandra Oliva
Sermons without church
For someone who doesn’t call herself a Christian, I listen to a lot of sermons. They’re providing some much-needed sustenance these days.
Brian Bantum
The genders within us
I am more and more convinced that trans people’s gender multiplicity will point us to our collective liberation.
Kelly Brown Douglas
One day in April
Martin Luther King Jr. was killed exactly a year after he delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” sermon. The tension between these two events is still with us.
Stephanie Saldaña
Hope arrives in the present tense
Living in the liturgical present makes salvation a story about us, not just the past.
Stephanie Perdew
Why I don’t like the label “progressive Christianity”
I’ve come to approach it with suspicion—for pastoral, political, and theological reasons.
Phil Christman
A better prayer for prisons
I love the Book of Common Prayer. I have some problems with Prayer #37.
Books
A 17th-century Dear Abby
Mary Beth Norton steers between the timeless and the time-lost in this all-too-slim book about the world’s first advice column.
Thumbs up
Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson zoom in on the like button as a synecdoche of digitalized life.
Marjorie Maddox’s vital disquiet
Her poems weave stories of trauma and survivorship, dancing on the frail and fraying edges of memory and perception.
Buried secrets
In Susan Gregg Gilmore’s new southern parable, 12-year-old Leonard buries his neighbors’ regrets alongside his own amputated leg.
A theology of self-help according to Thecla
Meggan Watterson finds in the Acts of Paul and Thecla a seven-step journey for personal growth.
What criminal justice reform will require
Debbie Hines draws on her legal career in Baltimore to show what redemption looks like in practice.
Deconstructing the Catholic imagination
Rebecca Bratten Weiss finds treasures in the ruins of Christian literary classics. But first, the idols need to be smashed.
Practicing compassionate patriotism
Recent books by Amanda Tyler and Drew Strait offer concrete, actionable advice for resisting Christian nationalism.
Departments
Easter in a brutal world
Michelle Angela Ortiz’s Delmy (Harrisburg, top) and Eres Mi Todo (Philadelphia, bottom) from the Familias Separadas series
Public health’s humble giant
The mischief of oppression
