moral imagination

Raj Nadella 2-12-2024
The illustration shows two purplish hands breaking apart a loaf of bread. The background is a purple and yellow burst of lines coming from the center.

Illustration by Lauren Wright Pittman 

IN THEOLOGIAN STANLEY Hauerwas’ influential book A Community of Character, he highlights the role narratives play in the formation and identity of a community. Stories have a descriptive function but also a formative function. Stories describe key events in the life of a community and preserve that community’s history. They also shape the community’s worldview and character. Stories influence the community’s ethos and commitments. They drive its actions. Gospel stories testify to the nature of Jesus’ mission and the ethos and commitments of the early church. They foreground Jesus’ character traits, which help shape our own ethical outlook and enable us to imagine an alternative moral space in society.

We live in a fraught political context where Christian identity has become a contested moral space. It’s a space increasingly shaped by dangerous nationalisms that celebrate oppressive power and that depict God in ways that provide theological justification for consolidation of power over others. However, the lectionary texts this month challenge just such depictions of God. They lift up the image of a God who suffers with the suffering rather than a triumphant God exercising domination. They feature characters, including Jesus, who insist that it matters what stories we tell and how we tell them.

What stories do we tell about the church today and how do we tell them? Do such stories shape our legacy as Christians and our moral imagination? How do we continue to tell those stories faithfully and meaningfully, allowing them to shape our lives, even in an era when many Christians are attracted to stories of a militant, oppressive God rather than to God’s motifs of justice?

Rose Marie Berger 11-18-2019

Illustration by Matt Chase

IMAGINE YOURSELF IN a darkened theater. At center stage sits a woman, child on her lap, both wrapped in tonal greys. A tiny stream of light falls from above. Off left, large animals shift their weight on floorboards, chuff-chuffing their breath; foreign tongues murmur them calm. Off right, the only sound is of metal rasps running repeatedly down the length of blades; random sparks flare off the cutting teeth. This is Epiphany. Everything is waiting to happen. We know the narrative detail: Mary and Jesus, a manger, the Magi’s star-trekking journey with camels and gifts to honor a “newborn king” (while Herod, like Pharaoh, plots a bloody offense). But Epiphany is a season for paradigm shifts. What if we scramble the details? Imagine this. Off left, the chuff-chuffing of foreign tongues come not from men calming beasts, but camels praying as they approach the child, the spiritual waterhole for the world. The camels have not brought kings or astrologers, but a guild of bakers, who extend platters of fresh bread toward the child. At center, the woman wrapped in a cloak of ultraviolet leans back on her stool: She has given birth to a star, filling them both with light. At her side stands a human child. He gazes off right. The sound of rasps and swords, boots and shouted commands fascinate him. Slowly, the child lets go his mother’s hand, relaxes his throat muscles, measures his breath. In a world of bread and circuses, he has made brothers of soldiers. He is a sword-swallower and eats their pain.

the Web Editors 5-09-2016

Screenshot via The White House / Youtube.com

President Obama delivered a commencement address on May 7 at Howard University, one of the nation’s premier historically black colleges.

In his speech, sprinkling jokes throughout, Obama encouraged the graduates to be proud of their achievement and hopeful about their future, but he also offered them some of his wisdom about how to change the world.

Illustration from Dickens' "Christmas Carol." Photo by Tim King.

Illustration from Dickens' "Christmas Carol." Photo by Tim King.

The Ghost of Christmas Past showed Scrooge a total of five visions. It is only the last two which are dark. The first three show the seeds of Scrooges own repentance.

The first vision shown to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas past is that of a young Scrooge reading alone, neglected by his peers, just before Christmas. Scrooge, watching his old self, begins to cry.

“What’s the matter?” asked the Spirit.

“Nothing,” said Scrooge. “Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should have given him something: that’s all.”