The prophets take a side. In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann explains how the ancient Hebrew prophets diverged from the imperial courts of Pharaoh and the royal courts of the later Israelite kings. As well as imagining new ways for society to take shape, he says, the prophets took sides. They were partisan because their […]
![Spiritual betrayal on the part of one [religion] affects the faith of us all. —R. Abraham Heschel](https://mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/HeschelX.jpg)
Find your people
Remember the story of the little red hen? The little red hen asks for help with reaping and grinding wheat and making and baking bread, but there are no takers. “Who will help me bake the bread?” she asks her farm friends. “Not I,” they each tell her, and they leave her to complete each […]
Picking up the mantle
The best way to honor a mentor is to practice what they taught you. It’s the application of the message that validates their work, not the affirmation or lionization they might attract. Their contribution to us all lies in what they taught and worked for during their lives, not in how we reinterpret them after […]
Our Greatest Power
I recently spent a week around the desert and red rocks of Central and Northern Arizona, and ended up at the Grand Canyon, an incredible example of what stone and water can do if given enough time. From the lip of compressed rocks, high above a river that’s carved dirt for millennia, my decades are […]