Pope Francis described migrants and refugees as the world's "weakest and most needy" on Monday, using his traditional New Year's address to "give voice" to people he has urged leaders to do more to help.
As one who enjoys the benefits of privilege in today's world, I felt it important to submit my own sense of what is just and right to other perspectives, especially other perspectives that are informed by biblical witness and the Christian gospel. The 2017 Summit represented that sort of challenge for me.
How do we become more prophetic?
First, we spend time with God each day growing into the vision. Day by day, we see ourselves and our world through God’s eyes a little more clearly.
2. From Evangelicals to Witches: How Religion Shaped 2017
Vox highlights four major religious trends, shifts, and changes in 2017, and ends with a little dose of optimism for 2018.
3. Real Gratitude Shouldn’t Be Easy: On ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
“At our frequent worst, gratitude isn’t something we feel so much as calculate, tallying our advantages to weigh against the miseries of others. In the privacy of our own minds, our gratitude can bear a family resemblance to schadenfreude—a secret reassurance that others will always have it worse.”
Start by saying yes: to God’s love, to engaged citizenship, to service to what is right, and courageous resistance to what is wrong.
Francis, leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, urged people to see the defenseless baby Jesus in the children who suffer the most from war, migration, and natural calamities caused by man today.
In the midst of fear and despair, Jim Wallis finds comfort and joy through living and trusting Christmas.
“I am so pro-protest and call-out and raising hell. I feel it coming,” one Auburn graduate and Alabama native, who recently moved to Minnesota, told me.
"I think the opportunities to act on these convictions for the good of others will continue opening. I hope they do. I’m ready for them.”
2017 was a year in which people were all too often treated as means to an end.
Perhaps in 2018 we can inscribe a different kind of a lesson.
2. Bringing Light to Our Nation’s Very Dark Night
“We feel the chill in our souls. We taste the darkness all around us. It’s important to remember: It’s only temporary. The light is still there – dimmed but never extinguished, ready to warm and lead us all over again, if we let it.”
A gorgeous photo essay featuring Bjorn Nilsen, the man who drives 125 miles every day to deliver mail to the residents of the isolated Lofoten Islands. “Among older residents, who suffer most from isolation, he might be the only person they see for days."