I’ve been reading about the life and death of Jesus since I was about three years old. And I spent many Friday nights during my childhood singing my way through all six cassette tapes of Handel’s Messiah (only Hogwood’s interpretation of the 1754 Foundling Hospital version will do!). Like the Nativity story in December, the Passion […]
Sending love to Gavin
Gavin Grimm is a 17-year-old trans student from Virginia who’s finishing his last year of high school and getting ready to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States. After parents and members of the public complained that Gavin’s school wasn’t requiring him to use separate facilities from other students, the school board held […]
Practicing faith responsibly
In Unprotected Texts, Jennifer Wright Knust reviews the internal complexity of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Many voices, communities, and perspectives are part of the anthology we now call “the Bible,” and these many perspectives sit side-by-side, sometimes rather uncomfortably. The Bible’s polyvalence—its many-sidedness—isn’t something that only anti-religious readers perceive. Over centuries, Biblical scholars have […]
Photo: Responding to the Cruciform Life
The first presentation is complete! This afternoon, I responded to Greg Boyd’s treatment of Christian discipleship as the call to live cruciform, in the form of the cross. Boyd has argued that Christians have a responsibility to shape their lives in terms of self-sacrifice. Grounded in Black history and theologies, I suggested that this teaching […]
A better basis for conversation
We are here. We have always been here. The fact that most of the churches have lived in blissful ignorance of our presence means nothing. Our task—our ministry to ourselves and to the church—is not to justify our presence, but to tell the church who we really are by our own definitions, rather than by […]
Defining “Us”
A few recent headlines on climate and environmental justice: While Shell’s Perdido platform has spilled 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and Shell faces a lawsuit on behalf of communities in Nigeria, Exxon’s shareholders have rejected proposals to include a climate change expert on their corporate board or consider how global carbon-reduction agreements would impact the company. Residents […]