For some religious leaders, spending hundreds of dollars for Christmas gifts - ostensibly to honor the birth of one who had "no place to lay his head" - is not merely ironic, it's sinful.
Departments
Tim Bascom 1-01-1994
The old one sits with limp hands, closed eyes.
She is gone, out there singing softly
And making love to God.
Jill Carroll Lafferty 1-01-1994
Money Matters
How do Christians respond to consumerism, the global economy, housing issues, and food crises?
Jim Rice, Jill Carroll Lafferty 1-01-1994
The U.S. government took hundreds of thousands of square miles from native people. In a recent ceremony in Alaska, the church gave a small portion of that land back.
Jim Rice, Jill Carroll Lafferty 1-01-1994
While many denominations across the globe have opened the door to the ordination of women, none have taken as resolute an action for equality as the Lutheran bishops of Sweden.
Jonathan R. Anderson 1-01-1994
AS A UNITED METHODIST, I was excited to see the excerpts of a pastoral letter from the United Methodist bishops of Appalachia (June 1993).
June G. Vajda 1-01-1994
I FIND SOJOURNERS a nuisance to read. I'm retired now, but I made my living in the publishing field for many years.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann 12-01-1993
Advent couldn't be more out of step with the doings of the dominant culture.
James Whitehead 8-01-1993
What Attorney General Janet Reno did not say to the F.B.I concerning their plans
Jim Rice 10-01-1992
Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff announced this summer that he is leaving the Catholic priesthood - but not the church - "to be free to continue working without impediments."
Joesph Bathanti 6-01-1992
Cycling into a straight
where an edge of sunflowers plows
four miles along a field of silage
I see the hot air balloon,
red and yellow herringboned,
slashing blue sideways
like a breech-baby fighting
for the ballast to right itself.
Walter Wink 6-01-1992
What we are seeking is the questions that themselves brought the text into being. We try to follow the questions back to their source, to comprehend what is moving in the questions. We become willing to suspend our favorite beliefs (and disbeliefs), to bring our own lives and understandings under radical scrutiny, to allow the text to examine us, rebound on us, as a fundamental challenge to our integrity. We give the Bible that much authority, not because we worship it, but because we are confident (we have heard about it happening to others or it has happened to us!) that the Holy Spirit is able to train its words on us, laser-like, and perform the soul-surgery that we need to become more whole, more real, more our true selves.
Jim Rice 6-01-1992
For Downtown United Presbyterian Church, the situation was fairly straightforward. The Rochester, New York congregation was looking for a co-pastor, and members felt Rev. Jane Adams Spahr was the most qualified candidate.
The case has become anything but simple. Conservatives in Downtown Church's presbytery filed a complaint against the validity of Spahr's call to the pulpit, claiming that her sexuality—she openly acknowledges that she is in a committed relationship with another woman—prevents her from serving as a pastor.
Even on the narrow grounds of Presbyterian church law, Spahr's case is far from open and shut. Last summer the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) failed to accept a report on human sexuality that called for, among other things, the ordination of gays and lesbians. And a 1978 church policy expressly prohibits ordaining homosexuals. But when the policy was passed, a clause was added to explicitly forbid the use of the regulation "to affect negatively the ordination rights" of those ordained before 1978. Spahr became a minister in 1974.
Regardless of the result of Spahr's May 19 hearing, her case—and the issue of the role of homosexuals in the church—will likely reverberate through the denomination for some time to come; the expected appeal process could take as long as a year. In addition, this summer's general assembly will consider a proposal to discipline "More Light" congregations that have come out in support of gay and lesbian people, an overture to altogether ban homosexuals from the church, and a report from the denomination's theology and worship committee on how the Presbyterian church should proceed on the issue of sexuality.
Jim Rice 6-01-1992
The struggle for equality in the church has taken several leaps forward and a significant step back in recent weeks. The U.S. Catholic bishops, in a highly publicized draft report on "women's issues," refused once again to stand up against the Vatican's ban on women priests.
The pastoral document, which will go before the whole body of American bishops in June, condemned sexism in society as a "moral and social evil" and said the church should examine its own "practices, possessions, power structures, and lifestyles" for repressive aspects—but held on to the male-only priesthood.
"Since the bishops are in the position of not extending the fruits of baptism to all people," feminist theologian and author Sister Madonna Kolbenschlag told Sojourners, "they shouldn't be saying anything about women—only about sexism and patriarchy. I don't think women can take seriously anything they say about women."
On a brighter note, the first women priests in the Anglican Church in Australia were ordained in March by Archbishop Peter Carnley of Perth, who declared, "Today we ordain 10 women, but we liberate tens of thousands." Six weeks before the historic ceremony, Dawn Kenyon—who had been ordained a priest in New Zealand in 1987—was installed as Australia's first woman rector in a mining-community parish east of Perth.