Poets resist anti-immigration laws with defiance, beauty, and social media.
Culture Watch
Danny Duncan Collum 5-01-2011
THE EGYPTIAN revolution started on Facebook. True. The Iranians who took to the streets last year to try to overturn a fraudulent election used Twitter to coordinate their actions and to communicate with the outside world. Also true.
César J. Baldelomar 5-01-2011
Latina/o Social Ethics: Moving Beyond Eurocentric Moral Thinking, by Miguel A. De La Torre.
Christine Foust 4-26-2011
Filmaker David Barnhart helps disaster survivors tell their ongoing stories of healing and recovery.
Julie Polter 3-01-2011
For nearly six decades, Mavis Staples has been bringing the gospel truth to song.
Brittany Shoot 3-01-2011
A review of Why Love Will Always Be A Poor Investment: Marriage and Consumer Culture, by Kurt Armsrong; foreward by Aiden Enns. Wipf & Stock.
Julie Polter 3-01-2011
Reviews of The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman, Standing in the Shoes My Mother Made, Somebody's Daughter, and This Sacred Moment.
Danny Duncan Collum 3-01-2011
American alienation is the real killer that stalks our past, and our present.
Julie Polter 3-01-2011
For nearly six decades, Mavis Staples has been bringing the gospel truth to song.
Rosalie G. Riegle 3-01-2011
All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg.
Gareth Higgins 2-01-2011
Preachers in American fiction are usually not to be trusted -- Elmer Gantry might steal from you, the priest in Mystic River might kidnap you, Robert Duvall’s Sonny i
Danny Duncan Collum 2-01-2011
In the past two years, the culture wars have been complicated on the Right by the rise of the "tea party." In a time of grave economic crisis and massive government action, the traditional right-wi
Carolyn McKinstry, Denise George 2-01-2011
On a September morning in 1963, terror came to the Sixteenth Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Jess O. Hale 2-01-2011
Split Ticket: Independent Faith in a Time of Partisan Politics, edited by Amy Gopp, Christian Piatt, Brandon Gilvin. Chalice Press.
Elizabeth Palmberg 2-01-2011
Bio: Helps local women's groups in Central America, Mexico, and Haiti start and run grant-seeded community lending pools. Website: www.maryspence.org
Nancy Lukens 2-01-2011
Photo via Gage Skidmore / Flickr
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writings, his prophetic Christian witness amid criminal abuses of power, racial persecution, terror, and genocide by his own government, and his martyrdom for participating in the coup to overthrow Hitler continue to inspire and provoke important questions and actions. The global following for this German pastor and theologian includes agnostics and atheists, evangelicals and liberal Protestants, Catholics and Jews, and people of many political persuasions, young and old alike.
By the same token, Bonhoeffer has been claimed by quite different, indeed opposite, religious groups, individuals, and political leaders to support their purposes. George W. Bush invoked his name before the German parliament in 2002 to justify the invasion of Iraq. Nelson Mandela read him in prison on Robben Island before his release in 1990. East German youth sang verses of his prison poem "By Powers of Good" before the fall of communism, without necessarily knowing he was a Christian.
The very titles of two biographies of Bonhoeffer that appeared within a few weeks of each other in 2010 suggest the diversity of those who may be drawn to him. While Eric Metaxas' book title, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich (Thomas Nelson), and his engaging style give his book the accessibility and appeal of a novel, it is stunningly flawed as a biography. Metaxas misleads readers both by his title and by his presentation of Bonhoeffer as a lone heroic figure. Yes, Bonhoeffer's covert position with a military intelligence office gave him the cover needed to travel abroad on behalf of the resistance, but a James-Bond-like "spy" he was not. Nor does Metaxas ever explain in the book the use of the term "righteous gentile" in the title. This designation is bestowed by Yad Veshem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, to those who aided Jews in the Holocaust. Does Metaxas know that Bonhoeffer has not been given this honor?
Betsy Shirley 2-01-2011
Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro. Zondervan.