With lower-cost heath care, would I be dead?
Feature
Ed Spivey Jr. 5-31-2011
A little Methodist church has a big heart for the left out and the lonley in the shadow of the nation's capital.
Charles Gutenson 4-01-2011
Too often we try to make scripture fit our own agenda, rather than the other way around.
Betsy Shirley 4-01-2011
Benedictine women in Wisconsin are practicing new (and ancient) ways to save the earth, starting with the home front.
Doug Thorpe 4-01-2011
Peace in Israel/Palestine will, more and more, revolve around struggles to control water, God's unownable gift.
Chuck Collins 4-01-2011
It's time to reform our tax system-- to quit rewarding obscene wealth, Wall Street gambling, and corporate polluters.
Jeannie Choi 3-01-2011
The median wealth of African-American women is 400 times less than their white counterparts. Policy expert Maya Rockeymoore tells us why that is, and what can be done.
Noemi Mena 2-16-2011
When those who feel accursed come to our door, are we ready with something holy?
Wendi C. Thomas 2-01-2011
A newspaper columnist in Memphis confronts racism in her hometown -- and is surprised to discover she is not alone.
Dan R. Ebener 2-01-2011
rangizzz / Shutterstock
Servant leadership is a paradoxical concept that is as old as Lao Tzu and Jesus and as new as Dorothy Day and Desmond Tutu. In a world desperately in need of new leaders and fresh models of leadership, now is a good time to examine the myths and paradoxes of what Christians mean by "servant leadership."
The key to unleashing transformative social change is developing leaders who will transform systems. Leaders transform themselves, people around them, organizations they lead, and, ultimately, communities they serve. Servant leaders foster servant churches, which become change agents for their neighborhoods and beyond.
Servant leadership may seem paradoxical to some, but that is precisely what we would expect from a leadership style modeled by Jesus. When management educator Robert Greenleaf coined the phrase in the 1970s, he intentionally selected a paradoxical term because it epitomized the paradoxical nature of the teachings and example of Jesus, who used parables to teach wisdom and who demonstrated the ultimate irony with his life and resurrection. Unfortunately, some self-proclaimed proponents of servant leadership now are equating it with everything from visionary leadership to effective time management.
Servant leaders are motivated first to serve and then to lead. The servant leader wants to serve rather than be served (Mark 10:45). The servant leader is more interested in giving than receiving (Matthew 5:40-42). The servant leader is a steward who wants to give back to God, family, and community.
Non-servant leaders, on the other hand, or "pedestal leaders," tend to command people and control what they do. These leaders have little interest in listening to the needs, interests, or ideas of others. They might call themselves "public servants," but they act as if they are interested in serving only themselves. They lack the humility to understand that leaders need people as much as people need leaders.
Logan Isaac 2-01-2011
Image via John Gomez/Shutterstock.com
He was in the army. Then he realized that, as a Christian, he couldn't kill. An Iraq vet grapples with conscience and war.
Anonymous 1-01-2011
My family had been farmers in the rough terrain of southern Mexico for centuries. My mother, the oldest of 12, began working in her teens to provide for her siblings. My father, one of five children, lost his father at age 3. Neither of my parents completed primary school. My father was 20 when he married my mom, who was 18. They had my sister a year later. Two years after that, I was born.
Jan. 10, 1990. It's unusually cold tonight in the small, arid town of San Miguel, Oaxaca. There’s no soap to wash me, so to keep the ants away, I'm laid to rest on my mother's stomach as we sleep together for the first time. Only my grandmother is present to aid in the delivery.
Spring 1992. My mother and father leave, planning to work for one year in New York and then return to Mexico.
Spring 1993. There's been a change of plans; after a year of separation, our father has returned to take my sister and me across the border and to our new home in New York. The three of us, along with an aunt, cross somewhere in Arizona. I'm glad our family is together again. Amazingly, my mother will soon have another child, and we will be five.
Fall 1994. With much anticipation, I've begun school. Although my thoughts, wishes, and entire vocabulary are in Spanish, I'm not too worried about my ignorance of the English language.
Anathea Portier-Young 1-01-2011
Apocalypses generate mixed reactions in our culture. They sell briskly at the box office. They are cathartic. They are foundational to the gospel and to Christian hope.
But they also feel dangerous and unsettling. They seem to feed a politics of certainty, triumph, fear, and exclusion. Many of us suspect our biblical apocalypses are harmfully radioactive. If we handle them at all, we put on gloves, and find it impossible to turn the pages.
What's really there? What are these ancient apocalypses?
Apocalypse is, first of all, a genre, or way of writing, that aims to convey a way of seeing. The first apocalypses asked their readers to open their eyes and see the world in a new light. They were actively resisting other ways of seeing. They offered images, symbols, and stories to combat the story and spectacle of empire.
In the ancient world empire was a transnational apparatus for the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, from rural to urban, from subjugated nations to the imperial seat. Conquest was its engine, leaving death, shame, and fear in its wake. Conquered peoples yielded up tribute, land, and labor.
Empires claimed the power to order the world. They ruled by force. They also ruled by the stories they told. They marked their power on people’s bodies. Structures of domination and subjugation were encoded in social interactions, gestures, and scripts. Through stories, myths, and symbols and through the habits and practices they shaped, empires could assert their rule as given, as the necessary and natural order knit into the fabric of time, space, and human life.
Rose Marie Berger 1-01-2011
When I moved to the riot-dismembered neighborhood of Columbia Heights, Washington, D.C., in 1986, I had no idea I would still be here more than 20 years later. I anticipated a rather bohemian life of Christian itinerancy—owning little property and moving where the spirit led. Instead, I was provided with a 100-year-old house (with much of the original wiring) and the gift of stability.
It is from this house that, on some mornings, I glimpse little neighborhood boys on their way to school. Donte Manning was undoubtedly one of those boys—laughing with the school crossing guard, running with his friends, scraping handfuls of snow off parked cars for snowballs. He was just a little boy.
In the mysterious mechanics of God's universe, Donte's murder on Holy Thursday in 2005 set off a spiritual alarm deep inside me. I followed the scraps of his story in The Washington Post. I read the police reports and spoke with neighbors. Over time, his story became linked with my own—and with our own story as Americans.
Donte Manning was in the third grade when he was shot in the face around the corner from my house. Pop, pop, pop. It was Holy Thursday—a little before 10 p.m. The next morning I was leaving Washington, D.C., for a trip to El Salvador. Pop, pop, pop. Six shots on a street filled with kids enjoying a warm night before the Easter holiday.
