Community

Sharon Hanshaw 4-21-2009

I am a native of Biloxi, Mississippi. To the rest of the world, we are the left behind communities. I thank God on a daily basis that I have the family I have. My father was a Baptist preacher that walked the walk and not just talked the talk. That is a rare jewel that we as people don't see a lot of.

Eugene Cho 4-20-2009
Ministry has its up and downs. Such is life.
Alan Bean 4-17-2009

NPR's Wade Goodwyn has been working on this story ever since he attended the premier of the film American Violet at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Hearne, Texas, three weeks ago.

Efrem Smith 4-14-2009
In this sermon, Pastor Efrem discusses the focus in April on Martin Luther King's death and the Easter Season, and proclaims that there is no separation between proclaiming the gospel and advancing
Shane Claiborne 4-14-2009
With the National Day of Prayer coming up (May 7), a lot of folks around the country are organizing prayer services in church sanctuaries and town halls.
Jim Goodman 4-08-2009
HR 875 The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 has gotten considerable attention lately and that is a very good thing, people should be concerned about food safety and more specifically how their
Sharon Watkins 4-07-2009

Some might say that this is the worst possible time to have a Mobilization to End Poverty. An elder of a church I served once told me, "You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their checkbook register

Dave Donaldson 4-06-2009
I've been asked to comment on churches that are more conservative, predominantly evangelical, and how they are coalescing around poverty reduction.
Connie Anderson 4-06-2009
In a stunning turnabout, some of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's firmest allies distanced themselves from his hard-line tactics when the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted to postpone accepting $1.6 m
Cesar Baldelomar 4-03-2009
Jesus, who was a Palestinian Jew living under Roman occupation, preached a message that was anti-state and religious imperialism.

An interview with L'Arche founder Jean Vanier and theologian Stanley Hauerwas.

Elizabeth Palmberg 4-01-2009

Nadezhda Bolotina / Shutterstock

“This is my body, broken for you,” Jesus says to us in the central mystery of our faith. “Take and eat.” Eating is an inherently good activity, a channel of God’s goodness.

But in recent decades, this well has been poisoned for huge numbers of people. Anorexia, rare until the 1970s, today affects an estimated 1.5 million people in the United States. Perhaps twice that number have or are recovering from bulimia, a cycle of binge eating and purging (through vomiting or laxatives); millions more have binge eating alone. Up to one in five people with anorexia die from it—the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness. Eating disorders devastate the body, eroding teeth and bones, and stopping kidneys and hearts.

Christians certainly are not immune from eating disorders (they were “everywhere” at evangelical Wheaton College, one alum in recovery reports). But when was the last time you heard eating disorders mentioned in church? The body of Christ has a vocation to speak truth about the deadly idols of this present age, but instead we’ve kept a deafening silence.

Worse, underneath that silence are rubrics that reinforce rather than unravel the problems. You’re damned if you diet (vanity!) and damned if you don’t (gluttony!). Desire (for food or anything else) is blamed on the body, and both are lumped together as potential causes of sin. Old-fashioned sexism or newer libertarianism both give a pass to the hypersexualization and commodification of women.

Meet Stephen Bartlett, an urban gardener and educator in Louisville, Kentucky.
Bailey Craft 3-18-2009
The clock is ticking for thousands of Liberian immigrants as the month of March draws to a close.
Efrem Smith 3-12-2009

It's always difficult to find just a few minutes from Pastor Efrem's sermons to highlight on the blog. With this sermon, it was impossible. So for a change, here's the entire sermon, in which he preaches from Proverbs 3 and talks about:

Edward Gilbreath 3-10-2009
An article in the Chicago Tribune caught my attention this week.
Seth Naicker 3-06-2009
I guess that people are on a journey when it comes to faith. Some admit to being on a journey, while there are those who state they have arrived.
Kevin Palau 3-05-2009
It's a new world we're living in. The troubles and hardships that were once easy to shove under our country's red, white, and blue rug now fly up in our faces on a daily basis.
Jim Wallis 3-02-2009
Four years ago, faced with a disastrous federal budget proposal, Sojourners coined a phase, "budgets are moral documents." That phrase has now entered the common lexicon, but it remains our fundam
Barby Zuniga Ward 2-26-2009
Most of my life I have been thinking about race and religion -- as a child when my family left my native Costa Rica to move to inner-city New Jersey, as a teenager struggling to develop my faith an