The current Keynesian economic system is on its last legs. The consolidation of wealth of the industrial revolution brought on the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the resulting war manufacturing of WWII created the middle class.

It is wonderful to find insights and practices like these getting into print. These essays voice for me just the sorts of issues our new and more selective faith(s) should be guiding us toward, climate above all.

Leah Schade and Margaret Bullitt-Jonas gather twenty-one faith leaders, scientists, community organizers, theologians, and grassroots climate activists to offer wisdom for fellow pilgrims grappling with the weight of climate change.

Kaitlin Curtice is a Native American Christian author and speaker. As an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band and someone who has grown up in the Christian faith, Kaitlin writes on the intersection of Indigenous spirituality, faith in everyday life, and the church.

Though most western religious traditions seem to promise some kind of afterlife, what if, as Martin Hägglund articulately argued, our limited mortal life is all there is? Our days, being limited in number, become more valuable, and our work becomes more meaningful. Without eternity, preserving the earth becomes more imperative. Though many spiritual teachers give assurances they cannot support with evidence, this sermon deals with morality in a matter-of-fact manner.

Lenny Duncan is the unlikeliest of pastors. Formerly incarcerated, he is now a black preacher in the whitest denomination in the United States: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Shifting demographics and shrinking congregations make all the headlines, but Duncan sees something else at work–drawing a direct line between the church’s lack of diversity and the church’s lack of vitality.

  Negative messages about sex come from all corners of society: from the church, from the media, from our own families. As a result, countless people have suffered pain, guilt, and judgment. In this instant bestseller, Nadia …

“At the center of the Christmas story is hope…hope which comes to us in the form of a vulnerable, poor baby. A child, not a king, changes the world. God appears to us as a marginalized, Afro-Semitic, Jewish child from Nazareth in Palestine. A child who grows up to teach us to welcome the stranger. How would our world be different if we loved our neighbors as ourselves?” asks the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church.

If we pay attention, the Christmas story is a mirror held up for us to see that we live in a country where the government locks thousands of migrant children into dog cages, sexually abusing some, torturing others, and allowing many to die while the church is largely compliant and silent. And we seriously wonder if this government might actually win election approval from poor church goers in a few months. Merry Christmas?

“Jesus heals not only us as individuals but a savior has been born, one who will heal the world from all its ills.”

Rev. Lines names the immaculate conception as “bad theology” and discusses the power of choosing to love.

In these dark and dreary days each year, our world turns to celebrate another Christmas holiday. Some may do so out of the sheer need to escape, if only for a fleeting while; grasping, once again, at a thin belief in some divine intervention into the human story, with the birth of a savior king. Deeply powerful rituals and traditions are dragged out of the attic and observed; going through the motions for yet another year. Others, however, like myself, may repeat some of the rituals to simply reaffirm one’s belief in the rebirth of “hope”.

I have never liked Luke 6:20, which says “Congratulations, you poor!” in newer translations. I think that’s demeaning.

Lo Divino nos está llamando
The Divine is calling us
para liberar a los cautivos,
to bring release to the captives,

Critics are often bullies who offer nothing of substance of themselves in public but they snipe at those who do enter the arena to try to make substance progress. Soren Kierkegaard called it “being stomped to death by geese.

My heart and passion is to see non-Christians come into a relationship with Christ and I believe that the most effective way for this to happen is to equip, encourage and empower our congregation members to be effective witnesses for Christ.

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