The Lenten season and Holy Week recall gospel lessons and other passages of Scripture appropriate to the season, yet we need to ask if we read these sacred texts of “Old” and “New” Testaments with awareness of the history that has unfolded over the past two millennia.
Israel’s Exile, should be a story that we keep close to heart, for the shape of this story promises to reshape the broken-down story that we seem to be living without revision.
On March 4, 2020 we published the first of many articles in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Today, we mark the occasion with this series of excerpts from articles published over the past year. They are a reminder of trials and tribulations experienced and challenges that remain. As with all that we publish, we hope these excerpts will inspire, encourage, and challenge our readers to bring a greater measure of justice, mercy, and faith into our communities and world.
For Ash Wednesday 2021, when even gathering for in-person worship is a matter of caution and clergy have been debating if, let alone how, one might safely impose ashes, could we make space in such rituals to feel the heaviness of a year now past in our Lenten disciplines and reflection? If we keep our personal piety disconnected from our global and national problems, are we truly learning the ways of mourning and penitence?
In his Letter, King saw with clarity from a jail cell what many in Birmingham could not or would not perceive in the social order’s status quo predicated on segregation and inequality. I prayerfully hope that we will experience indictment anew from King’s Letter as a people gathering to celebrate King’s witness just weeks after early January’s national turmoil. The myopic habits to exclude and occlude others in society are still strong in the American psyche and certainly proved pernicious in the last few years—and devastatingly so in recent weeks.