In an attempt to rally the old Religious Right during this election year, conservative political activists in North Carolina have named April 29 “Family Sunday.” Pulpits cannot be used to endorse a particular candidate in the United States, but the proposed Amendment One is a “nonpartisan” ballot issue. So churches are free to use up to 15 percent of their annual budget and all the airtime they want to tell their flocks how to vote on this measure. The organizers... Read more
I was recently in Austin, Texas to give a lecture at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. While there, I had the chance to share dinner with folks from about a dozen different communities around the city. College students shared about how they’re trying to find a rhythm of life in a common house, while a middle-aged woman talked about how her community has negotiated time commitments as kids have grown up and become adults. These folks were brought together by a great... Read more
In the desert monastic tradition, women and men who left the city to pray in the abandoned places of their society made a spiritual discovery: when you get down to the most basic level of our struggle against the devil and all his wiles, what we wrestle against is not bad political leaders or corrupt business executives. Our enemy is neither the people who’ve done us wrong nor the people who are using our neighbors for their own ends. Though... Read more
As a national conversation about racial justice continues around the Trayvon Martin case, an historic decision was handed down in a North Carolina court today. In the first appeal under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, Judge Gregory A. Weeks of Cumberland County Superior Court commuted Marcus Robinson’s death sentence to life, citing evidence of “intentional discrimination” in jury selection at his capital trial. Lauren Winner, who teaches in School for Conversion’s Project TURN prison classes, has written a nice summary... Read more
One of the things that I love most about hosting this blog is the chance to invite testimonies from witnesses who have heard and seen what God is up to in The Everyday Awakening that’s happening all around us. If you have a story to share, I’d love to hear it. Today, I want to celebrate a witness who’s testimony has been a guiding light to me over the past decade. One of the most promising theologians of the 1960’s... Read more
A decade ago, when we moved to Walltown and were getting to know our neighbors, my friend Andy Marin moved to Boystown in Chicago. Like me, Andy is an evangelical Christian. In the churches where he came to faith and learned what it means to be a disciple, he had been told that homosexuality was a sin. In the locker room where he hung out as an athlete, he’d learned to make fun of “fags.” But when Andy learned that... Read more
Easter is the season when Christians make our biggest claim: that death has been defeated, that Jesus is alive, that the way things are is not the way things have to be. There is a new creation. We drag our kids out of bed before sunrise to stand in gardens and sing these truths. They are the anchor of our hope in the world. But as we were singing at Rutba House this year, I thought about how hard it... Read more
As Leah and I walked the stations of the cross with our kids this morning, I was struck by the way the women in Jesus’ life stuck with him til the end. The woman who wipes his face, the women who weep, and, finally, his mother who is there at the foot of the cross, watching her son die. As I meditated on what it must of meant for Mary to stay with Jesus, that sword that Simeon had foretold... Read more
The constant stream of news this week about Trayvon Martin has re-ignited a national conversation about race–a conversation that has been, in my estimation, neither this public nor this intense since the controversy surrounding President Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, during the 2008 presidential campaign. The deep pain at the center of this conversation reveals a wound that we often try to hide, despite the fact that it will not go away. Our history of race-based slavery colors everything in... Read more
I’ll admit, I’m an obsessive reader. I like to keep a book on hand for that spare moment at a stop light, between bites at lunch, during a lull in conversation (just kidding… mostly). A few months ago, I was getting on a plane–one of those little ones that flies between cities you’ve never heard of–and the flight attendant took my bag at the last minute. I didn’t even have a chance to grab my book. I fell into the... Read more
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
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