Editor's Note: We published hundreds of pieces on the Sojourners blog in 2014, on issues of gender equality, immigration reform, contemplative spirituality, racial justice, reconciliation, poverty, and everything in between. Below are 20 of our favorite writings through the year, from January to December. Thanks for reading with us!
1. A New Normal: Ten Things I’ve Learned About Trauma
by Catherine Woodiwiss
This is the big, scary truth about trauma: there is no such thing as “getting over it.” The five stages of grief is a universally-referenced model in learning to accept loss, but the reality is in fact much bigger: a major life disruption leaves a new normal in its wake. There is no “back to the old me.” You are different now, full stop.
2. When Christians Love Theology More Than People
by Stephen Mattson
The practical application of your love is just as important as the theology behind it. Our faith is evidenced by how we treat others. Does the reality of your life reflect the theory behind your spiritual beliefs?
3. How Not to Raise a Daughter
by Sandi Villarreal
Being the future mother of a girl, I had grand ideas about “protecting” her from human-made gender norms. I ordered the “Forget Princess; Call Me President” onesie. I shunned head-to-toe pink (for about a week). I created a collage wall in her nursery of black-and-white photos of all of the badass women in her family she has to look up to. And then this week I caught myself doing something that has the potential to harm my daughter more than being drenched in pink and purple for the next 18 years ever could.
4. What 'Frozen' Teaches us about Power, Privilege, and Community
by Cindy Brandt
As G.K. Chesterton says, "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
5. Sex and the Never-Ending Christian Adolescence
by Tom Ehrich
I don’t know any adult who would willingly repeat adolescence. Yet here we are — we Christians seeking hope, grace, mercy, and purpose, we believers in a God of justice — treating our faith as an endless adolescence centered around sex.
by Multiple Authors
Encouraging, frustrated, compassionate, witty — this collection of letters to the modern church in America is fabulous start to finish. Letters from Beau Underwood, Mark Sandlin, Brandan Robertson, Derek Penwell, Michael Swartzentruber, Cindy Brandt, Chris Chatelaine-Samsen, Adam Phillips, Jordan Davis, Joe Kay, and Meredith Dodd.
by Catherine Woodiwiss
Hacking is a potent lens that Christians across denominations are using to repurpose, mobilize, and reform the church. Just as faith systems give parameters to our spiritual imagination, so technology directs our inquiry into the universe and, increasingly, our connectedness to each other. Today’s faithful hackers, armed with code, workshops, and participatory-minded theology, see a model for the future of Christianity.
8. Behind #WeAreN: 'If One Group Is Marked, We're All Marked'
by Jeremy Courtney
A Muslim movement that says, “We are all Christians,” is subversive in the most daring of ways. It taunts the Islamic State and says to suffering neighbors, “Doctrine aside, we see your humanity. You should not be marked for extermination. If they’ve marked you, then we will mark ourselves. If they come for you, they can come for us, as well.”
by Joe Kay
Listening to several Fourth of July discussions, I was struck by how many people think of freedom as the ability to do whatever they want. They think there should be few, if any, restrictions on what they choose to do or what they want to own. But freedom isn’t about having unlimited choices. It’s about the choices we make.
10. The Moral Failure of Immigration Reform: Are We Really Afraid Of Children?
by Jim Wallis
More than 52,000 unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have walked across the U.S. border since last October—some, unfortunately, by way of human trafficking networks though Mexico. The surge has become a very serious humanitarian crisis to which U.S. officials are scrambling to respond. But incredibly, some Republicans have used this tragic situation as an excuse for why they scuttled immigration reform—when having a smart, fair, and humane immigration system in place would have helped avoid this crisis.
11. Not As Helpless As We Think: 3 Ways to Stand In Solidarity With Ferguson
by Rachel Held Evans
When it comes to violence and oppression, we are rarely as helpless as we think, and this is especially true as the events unfolding in Ferguson force Americans to take a long, hard look at the ongoing, systemic racism that inspired so many citizens to protest in cities across the country this week.
by Ryan Herring
Cornel West once said that 9/11 was, "The first time that many Americans of various colors felt unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated." Since then — through the "war on terror" and the influence of xenophobia in the mainstream media — the face of terrorism has been Muslim extremists. But as Dr. West also said, "To be black in America for 400 years is to be unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated."
by Lisa Sharon Harper
Joy is like the deepest leagues of the ocean. Though hurricanes rage above, it stands still. Joy is like the sun and the moon: No matter what happens on earth, they are constant. They rise and rise and rise again. Joy is sly, smiling in the face of disaster, as if it knows a secret.
14. The Measure of a Christian
by Juliet Vedral
Stephanie and I began to email back and forth about politics through the lens of faith, which tested whether we were Christians or ideologues first. We shared two things in common in holding our different political beliefs because: 1) we had both thought a lot about them, and, 2) shockingly, neither of us had an interest in destroying America. Eventually Stephanie and I decided to co-write a bipartisan series for our website, looking at partisanship through the lens of faith (summary: love for Jesus makes for fertile common ground).
15. It’s About More Than Football
by Jim Wallis
When Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was suspended for only two games for beating his fiancée (now wife), it became a dramatic public example of the lack of accountability for professional athletes. But this epidemic is about so much more than Goodell, whose lack of leadership is typical in professional sports. It’s about more than one team, one league, or sports in general.
16. No Left Turns: How We Normalize Dysfunction
by Christian Piatt
UPS has a proprietary navigation system that helps drivers plot out all of their stops in a day and the most efficient way to get there. And based on their research, left turns result in more wasted time and more accidents than they’re worth. Not making left turns means UPS drivers save time. They save money. All it took was thinking differently about how the delivery routers should be configured without all of those high risk, time-consuming left turns. ...We could apply the same line of questioning to church.
17. Four Challenges for Christians After Brittany Maynard’s Death
by Timothy King
The greatest gift Christianity has to offer is not in the condemnation of the choice to take one’s life but in the provision of a compelling alternative. When we paint an alternative for others to consider, it should be based in a love for life — not fear of death. New Hampshire, my home state, is famous for its state motto, “Live Free or Die.” But the full quote from General John Stark is “Live free or die, for death is not the worst of evils.”
18. Torture, the Bible, and America's Faith in Violence
by Derek Flood
Whether it is described in the vocabulary of religion or more "secular" terms, violence — and in the case of torture, shockingly inhumane violence — is described as a necessary means for bringing about the good. This logic is at the heart of all religious violence, and it is a view that is alive and well today.
by Jim Wallis and Sandi Villarreal
The fact that the journalistic “scandal” got more public attention than the original story should give us pause. And the narrative that is playing out in the story’s wake — the one that says the college campus rape crisis is nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by the left — is disturbing. Failure to recognize the sins of power and domination that influence the acts of violence against half of God’s creatures is simply bad theology.
20. Tackling the Hard Questions
by David Gushee
The current frontier on LGBT issues in the church is whether evangelicals will come to terms with how to respect, accept, and even offer support for covenantal same-sex relationships being undertaken by their gay and lesbian minority. There are fine Christians on both sides, and civil dialogue about such matters, in the spirit of Romans 14, is absolutely essential, and all too rare.
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