Lately I’ve been thinking that I wish I had a big picture view of church life in North America in the fall of 2023. Then I realized having a big picture view is probably a pipe dream. Part of life in the church in 2023 is just who’s here and who isn’t.
When I see an apron, I think of service. I think of hospitality. I want my apron to remind me that to follow the lowly Galilean, I’m called to a life of service and hospitality, which embraces the personal and works to strip away anything disingenuous.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote “Why We Can’t Wait,” he was correct. Day after day, our voices and actions are called upon to labor for justice. Yet burnout is counterproductive to our advocacy for the least of God’s children, which may be why Jesus told his followers, and us, not to worry about tomorrow.
What happened in Israel last Saturday and continues to this moment is an inhumane, unjustifiable, and atrocious terrorist attack that must be condemned by all people of good will.
“The American Way: A True Story of Nazi Escape, Superman, and Marilyn Monroe” traces seemingly disparate loose threads that come together – largely connected by the complicated figure of comic book publisher Harry Donenfeld.
Many male clergy routinely disrespect women, including fellow clergy, through words, actions, and thoughts. None of this is by coincidence or happenstance, nor does it happen in isolation—it is both by design and a perpetual product of society’s, including the church’s, refusal not just to explicitly acknowledge sexism and misogyny but far more critically, to do the dire work of repenting and addressing these ills in ways that do not require women to “to do the work.”