Key contemplative spirituality terms.
Feature
Walter Brueggemann 2-01-2009
Biblical faith invites us out of self-destruction toward God's generosity and abundance.
Chuck Collins 2-01-2009
As our economy continues to decline, "common security clubs" are one way people can support each other and take action for a more just future.
William O'Brien 1-01-2009
For years, I had fought against the stigmas that dehumanize people with mental illness. Now here I was on the inside.
Emmanuel Katongole, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove 1-01-2009
A Ugandan Catholic priest, the child of Rwandan parents -- one Hutu and the other Tutsi -- explains how missionary Christianity helped create the divisions that led to genocide.
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson 12-01-2008
Forming relations with people of faith in the Holy Land could help transform the U.S. role in the region.
Ronald Williamson 12-01-2008
How a Howard Thurman lecture series has transformed a university -- and much more.
The Editors 12-01-2008
When President Bush leaves office in January, he’ll take with him the cadre of neo-cons who shaped the administration’s foreign policy over the last eight years.
John Prendergast 12-01-2008
Why Africa is a land of endless possibilitiy -- and how that should guide U.S. relations with the continent.
Kimberly Burge 11-01-2008
God is in the details—or is it the devil? Authenticity certainly lurks there, which is abundant in the best fiction. Uwem Akpan understands this. When writing about Rwanda, he wanted to get the details right. Marriage customs, traditional dress, the color of the earth—the small, everyday matters that make a story come alive and that inhabitants of a place will spot right away if a writer gets it wrong. So Akpan attempted to travel to Rwanda for research.
But his superiors wouldn’t let him take the trip—they preferred that he remain at his seminary in Kenya. He was resigned to asking questions of his Jesuit brothers in letters and e-mails, and left to imagine Rwanda’s earth.
Akpan is most likely the first Nigerian Jesuit priest to have two stories published in The New Yorker, that Holy Grail for short story writers. “An Ex-Mas Feast” and the Rwanda story “My Parents’ Bedroom” are both featured in his first collection, Say You’re One of Them, published last June by Little, Brown and Company. In two novellas and three stories, he juxtaposes startlingly lucid writing and imagery with nearly unspeakable situations—child trafficking, genocide, religious and tribal divisions and violence, and desperate poverty. Each of the stories takes place in a different African country, and all are told through the perspectives of children.
Here’s the voice of 8-year-old Jigana at the opening of “An Ex-Mas Feast”: “Now that my eldest sister, Maisha, was 12, none of us knew how to relate to her anymore. She had never forgiven our parents for not being rich enough to send her to school.”
Molly Marsh 11-01-2008
Song for Night, by Chris Abani
A 15-year-old boy named My Luck, a human mine detector in an unnamed West African war, wakes up to find he’s been separated from his platoon. He can’t speak—like his comrades, his vocal cords have been cut so that if a mine explodes, they won’t be heard screaming—but his journey through the physical and emotional wreckage of war, which include his own deadly actions, is eloquent and heartbreaking. “[E]ven with the knowledge that there are some sins too big for even God to forgive,” he thinks, “every night my sky is still full of stars; a wonderful song for night.” (Akashic Books, 2007)
The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai
The action moves between northeast India—where a retired judge, his orphaned granddaughter, and their England-loving neighbors live near the borders of Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan—and New York, where a cook’s son lives the terrifying life of an immigrant. All of Desai’s characters struggle in deep and painful, yet often funny, ways with the forces of colonialism, globalization, and modernity. (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006)
Rose Marie Berger 11-01-2008
Mary Doria Russell’s science fiction books The Sparrow and Children of God put Jesuits in space and wrestle with the missionary issues of first contact. She’s gone on to write historical fiction, including A Thread of Grace, which tracks the underground efforts of Italians to save Jews during the final phase of World War II, and Dreamers of the Day, which explores the 1921 Cairo Conference through the perspective of an Ohioan woman caught up in forces that would shape the modern-day Middle East. Now Russell has jumped genres again and is writing a murder mystery/Western set in Dodge City, Kansas. Sojourners associate editor Rose Marie Berger interviewed Russell, who lives in Cleveland, this summer by e-mail.
Rose Marie Berger: How would you describe your spiritual journey?
Mary Doria Russell: Hardheaded. Pragmatic. Poetic. In that order!
How has your understanding of God changed over time? In 1955, the kindergarten kids at Pleasant Lane School in Lombard, Illinois, were told to bring in “something that is important to you” for show-and-tell. I remember this very clearly. A devout Catholic at that age, I arrived with a milk-glass statuette of the Virgin Mary and told the class that she was important to me because “she was the mother of God, and if it weren’t for her, there’d be no God, and then there’d be no world.”
Simply speaking those words aloud got my 5-year-old self thinking about the logical and sequential questions that statement begged. I became a more sophisticated Catholic as I matured, but eventually the theological package linking the Trinity, original sin, divine incarnation (with or without virgin birth), and salvation through blood sacrifice lost all credibility for me.
Elizabeth Palmberg 11-01-2008
Some—okay, a lot—of science fiction treats religion, and even spirituality, as pre-rational claptrap or dangerous authoritarianism. But jostling on the same shelves as the neo-imperialist space wars and the vampire-themed soft porn, there’s a universe of spiritually relevant good writing. Some examples from the last decade:
Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn
When a starship full of insectoid aliens crash-lands in a German village just before the advent of the Black Plague, the author gives credit and care to the parish priest’s training in logic, to Christian caritas, to the 14th-century European political and intellectual landscape, and to how they might interact with giant grasshoppers from space. (Tor, 2006)
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler
In response to a near-future U.S. wracked by environmental and social breakdown, young Lauren Olamina starts her own religion, Earthseed, whose scriptures proclaim that “God is change” and that humanity’s destiny is to reach the stars. Her vision leads her into deep family complications, somewhat manipulative behavior, and multiple run-ins with the nasty Church of Christian America. (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993; Seven Stories Press, 1998)
Josh MacIvor-Andersen 9-01-2008
Student activists are finding that sometimes conversation, not confrontation, is the way to make a difference.
Chuck Collins 9-01-2008
Why concentrated wealth and the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us are not only bad for our economy but threaten democracy itself.
Holly Liebowitz Rossi 9-01-2008
Theological schools and seminaries are changing the ways they prepare their students for our increasingly multireligious world.