Church
Take & Read: Practical theology
Five new books about the practice of ministry after our recent calamities
The holy simplicity of artist John August Swanson
His art is like the man who created it: joyful, loving, and gently curious.
When Mennonites were settlers
John Eicher’s history exposes European Mennonite complicity in Native dispossession.
Who is welcome at the communion table?
Maybe the grace experienced in the sacrament precedes belief.
How a Serbian Orthodox congregation in Kansas City offers hospitality beyond the liturgy
At Thelma’s Kitchen, every table is a holy table and every guest a living icon.
The roots of India’s united churches
How the Church of South India and Church of North India were formed—and how they fare today.
Is Brazil’s Universal Church of the Kingdom of God a field hospital or a marketplace?
A look inside the thriving (and sometimes controversial) neo-Pentecostal denomination
Leveraging the power of relational organizing in Baltimore
“The historical truth is that no single person—no matter how gifted—has led complex social change on her own.”
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.
Beauty from ugliness on the US-Mexico border
Presbyterian border ministry in Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora
Author Walter Wangerin’s many lives and words
Those of us who worked with him sometimes suspected he had cloned himself.
A father and his dying daughter came to see me. They wanted different things.
Sometimes truth is better than comfort.
Willimon and Hauerwas’s out-of-season words on pastoral care
Pastors coping with the pandemic need our encouragement, not our carping.
Pastoral care is part of Christian formation
A response to Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas
This Seattle church’s stained-glass Jesus was far too White
So a local artist found a creative way to cover him up.
How will history judge Latin American churches’ COVID response?
Likely with both praise and blame.
The labor that pays my salary
Survival under capitalism makes demands on our flesh—and some of us have to pay more than others.
Restoring bicycles—and lives—in Memphis
Revolutions Bicycle Cooperative, a church-based bike shop with a social vision
The Naming Project is a Christian camp that celebrates LGBTQ teens as they are
“We ask questions like, who am I? Who did God make me to be?”
It takes faith to resist the attention economy
We need to relearn a capacity to dwell in God’s presence.