general
The Global Christian Forum is a new phenomenon bringing together Christian churches from throughout the globe and the different parts of the Christian community - from Pentecostal to Catholic, historic Protestant to Orthodox. In the March issue of Sojourners, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson [...]
In what has been described as the largest cross-border attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Turkish military is now into its 6th day of a ground offensive inside the Kurdish [...]
I'm always a bit anxious in new worship environments. As I settle into my plastic chair at New Beginnings Lutheran Church, I realize that now is certainly no different. At least, I think to myself, my cell phone won't go off in worship; it was confiscated by the guard before I went through the metal detector.
New Beginnings is a congregation on the inside of the Denver Women's Correctional Facility, and I've come with three others from my own community to share in their worship service. [...]
I haven't yet read the whole study released yesterday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life titled, "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey," just some of today's news reports. But what I have read confirms what I see on the road every week. U.S. citizens are on the move religiously. Many people are not staying in the churches of their upbringings. "This is not your parents' church," many now could say as they [...]
Christian Peacemaker Teams has had a team in Kurdistan for over one year. CPT has been slowly learning that the effects of the war and the relationship with the [...]
We are painfully reminded once again of the cascading violence in the U.S. after the senseless killing of six and wounding of many others at Northern Illinois University. But in my low-income Chicago community, the violence and killing have almost numbed us. I hear gunshots out my window regularly in the summer, and the annual homicide toll from guns in our two-square-mile community is often more than 30. The Children's Defense Fund indicates that almost 3,000 youth die in the U.S. annually [...]
I was in Lebanon and Syria in January and saw up close the agony of the war.
In Damascus, young Iraqi refugees have created a youth choir at the Good Shepherd Center. After singing for [...]
Susan sat on her bed, looking frightened and sad. The 27-year-old had lost the lower half of her left leg when at 2 a.m. Dec. 16, Turkish fighter planes dropped four bombs on her home in a village [...]
March 19 will be the fifth anniversary of the war with Iraq. In this season of Lent, we are called to lament and repent for an ongoing war that is being waged by our country, financed by our taxes, and fought by our brothers and sisters. After five years, we all lament the suffering and [...]
The Bush administration wants Congress to sign off on an administration-negotiated trade agreement with Colombia, alleging that to do otherwise is, as one analyst put it, to "turn our back on our friends." But with friends like this, Colombia really doesn't need enemies. Consider:
Running interference for genocide is not an Olympic sport. And now Nobel laureates such as Shirin Ebadi and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are joining with former Beijing 2008 Olympic Games artistic advisor Stephen [...]
...I pledged to stay away from this site for a couple of weeks to see if the discussion could possibly turn more civil and not be dominated by one person. Since I had a half hour to kill before leaving for the evening, I broke my pledge (weakness on my part) and checked the most recent blog on sojo.net just to see if anything at all had changed. [...]
Looking for parallels to the Dobson versus conservative evangelical rank-and-file phenomenon, I'm struck by the Democratic vote in Massachusetts. Despite endorsements from Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, Governor Deval Patrick, and The Boston Globe, the state broke for Sen. Hillary Clinton. I find it encouraging that official endorsements don't mean that much to the average voter, and though my sense is that in general Clinton enjoys more support from the Democratic establishment [...]
Because I was born in 1963, I qualify as a bottom-of-the-barrel "baby boomer" (a person born between 1946 and 1964). I'm not ready to make a post-workforce transition or second-half of life vocational shift, but I'm watching my elders who are.
In Sunday's Washington Post, there was an article by Marc Freedman
The New Year began with bang. When it comes to presidential politics, we certainly saw some new beginnings. Sen. Barack Obama made history by becoming the first African American to win in Iowa, making him the clear front-runner (well, at least for a week or so). But after Sen. Clinton won New Hampshire, not only did it become clear that this would be one of the most interesting and most-watched presidential races in history, something else rose to the surface. We were reminded that while [...]
God's Politics called on people to take back their faith after it had been "hijacked" by the Religious Right. Millions of Christians have done just that, and now the question is what are we going to do with our faith, now that we have it back? My new book, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, addresses that question.
My friend E.J. Dionne Jr., a [...]
When I asked a leading progressive biblical scholar who was doing the very best bible work on images of God and gender theology, she didn't hesitate in her answer: Elizabeth Johnson, she said.
Johnson, a Roman Catholic sister in the Congregation of St. Joseph, is interviewed about images of God in the January U.S. Catholic (
During the South Carolina Republican debate, Mike Huckabee garnered greatest applause when defending his views of wifely submission as part of his evangelical faith. The questioner quizzed Huckabee about being one of 131 signers of a 1998 USA Today ad by the Southern Baptist Convention that asserted, "a wife is to graciously submit herself to the servant leadership of her husband." Huckabee responded by saying "I am not the least bit ashamed of my faith." He joked that his own wife [...]
[Continued from parts one and two. Click here to read the full response as one post.] On Jan. 3, Focus on the Family's CitizenLink criticized those of us who responded to an invitation to dialogue with 138 Muslim scholars.