Wallis, who will be speaking this Sunday, Aug. 16, at the Harbor Church at 10 a.m., has done everything from walkside by side with Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu, to getting thrown in jail to, most recently, organizing peaceful protests on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. What has motivated him, since being a teenager in Detroit, is a powerful sense of racial equality and social justice. As American streets were the scenes of rioting and unrest45 or 50 years ago, so are some of them again today, borne out of issues that seem to rise and fall at any given time.
Source: Block Island Times | Lars Trodson
Source: Relevant | Lisa Sharon Harper
Today, the real killer is the unconscious biases that shape the course of every day: Where we live, where we work, where we send our kids to school, who we dream of our children marrying, and where we worship.
Source: Huffington Post | Charles Redfern
"No longer a simply political or even a scientific issue, climate change is now a moral imperative that the church must respond to."
Source: Urban Milwaukee
"No longer simply a political or even a scientific issue, climate change is now a moral imperative that the church must respond to"
Source: Huffington Post | Lisa Sharon Harper
May God help us all to enter the one year commemoration of Michael Brown's death and the uprising in Ferguson, MO by reflecting on how we responded to God's question a year ago: "Ask what I should give you in the face of black death?"
Source: Patheos | Kyle Roberts
As a satirist, he has played something of the role of the prophet. Whether Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, or Jon Stewart, satirists help the rest of us give voice to the craziness. And sometimes that’s all we need.
Source: Poughkeepsie Journal | Bill Decker
We have supported this endless war for the past half century; most recently, the Iraq-Afghanistan wars costing more than 8,000 lives of our soldiers, nobody knows how many civilian lives in those two countries, thousands of disabled veterans, and about $3 trillion. Why not try another tack when the one we have chosen has battered our nation so brutally?
Source: Relevant | Jesse Carey
We recently spoke with Lisa Sharon Harper, Chief Church Engagement Officer and columnist at Sojourners and one of the authors of Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith, about the string of police shootings, how our society can hold authority figures more responsible and how the evangelical church can help usher in change and racial reconciliation.
Source: Seacoast Online | Robert Azzi
Today, I find something profoundly un-American happening in Washington, something profoundly unsettling about the tone taken by opponents of the agreement negotiated between the P5+1 and Iran.
“He was impregnably armoured," Graham Greene wrote of Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, "by his good intentions and his ignorance."
Source: Huffington Post | Jim Wallis
There's a new kind of language being used around the Iran nuclear deal recently negotiated in Vienna. We can call it "Trump Talk," defined as a drumbeat of outrageous political speech that is historically inaccurate, intellectually dishonest and even deceptive, morally and spiritually offensive and willfully tone deaf.
If politicians are letting one person trump the tone of politics, just to go up in the polls or get on the debate stage, that's very bad news for our nation's civil discourse.
It certainly isn't serious talk. Serious talk is "Hard work." "Difficult negotiations." "Competing interests." "Coalitions and diplomacy." Serious talk recognizes that no agreement, no matter how diligently negotiated, is perfect.
Source: Christian Post | Tony Magliano
We can either choose to rationalize and condone violence and war, or we can help God build his kingdom of life and love. In the biblical book of Deuteronomy, the author lays out a divine ultimatum for humanity: "I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord, your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him."
May we always choose life!
Source: Catholic News Service | Daniel O'Shea
Seven presidential candidates have responded to a call from anti-poverty advocates by submitting brief videos outlining their plans to address poverty.
The videos, delivered to an umbrella organization known as the Circle of Protection that includes the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, were made public July 21 by representatives of the group.
Source: National Catholic Reporter | Michael Sean Winters
Saturday, there was a conference, well, not exactly a conference, at the Chicago Theological Seminary titled, “Women in the Catholic Church: What Francis Needs to Know.” Conferences have a certain academic flavor. This event had all the theological sophistication of a high school pep rally. You can find the on-demand video of the event here.
One panel especially caught my attention: “Sex, Sexuality and Other Unmentionables.” I do not know about anyone else, but it seems to me that way too much time within the Catholic community has been spent discussing sex and sexuality. The subject is anything but unmentionable. There is a veritable tsunami of articles and books on the topic. But, as predicted in these pages shortly after the election of Pope Francis, this panel demonstrated the divide within the Catholic Left that Francis has made obvious, between those of us who care primarily about the poor and the marginalized and those who care mostly about pelvic theological issues. The event at CTS was a kind of political convention for the latter group.
Source: Christian Post | Stoyan Zaimov
Former President Jimmy Carter has said in an interview that he does not believe Jesus Christ would support abortion in most cases, identifying the "only conflict" he's had between his political duties and Christian faith. "I have never believed that Jesus would be in favor of abortion, unless it was the result of rape or incest, or the mother's life was in danger. That's been the only conflict I've had in my career between political duties and Christian faith," Carter told The New York Times in an interview posted on Friday.
Source: Anglican Communion News Service
American Friends of the Episcopal Church of Sudan and South Sudan and the Episcopal Church in the United States have co-signed an open letter to US President Barack Obama urging him to help put an end to the conflict in South Sudan.
In the letter, 19 religious organisations and NGOs urge Mr Obama to use his upcoming visit to Africa to "press for a solution to the ongoing crisis in South Sudan and stress the need for greater regional cooperation to pressure the warring parties to make the necessary concessions for a sustainable peace in South Sudan."
Source: Christian Post | Jeffery Walton
Evangelical Left figures have begun responding to an unfolding scandal involving Planned Parenthood and the alleged sale of organs from aborted children for profit. The authors and columnists join officials from the Southern Baptist Convention, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and others in expressing concern about the allegations.
Source: MSR News | Clarence Hightower
A few weeks ago I introduced a column discussing the official U.S. poverty rate by referencing the 2011 poverty bus tour that was organized by Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West. In August of that year, Smiley and West visited a total of 18 cities in 11 states. Designed to reveal the many faces of poverty that persist across racial, cultural and geographic lines, the tour commenced on an Ojibwe reservation in northwest Wisconsin before culminating at a town hall meeting in Memphis and a visit to the Lorraine Motel, site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Source: Christian Post | Samuel Smith
A coalition of Christian leaders devoted to helping end poverty has released a series of videos featuring six 2016 presidential candidates. Each candidate explained the approach that he or she would take to solve poverty and hunger issues in the United States and across the globe if they were elected president.
Source: Cypress Creek Mirror | Rick Brown
Find a global need and meet it. There are numerous organizations that you can donate some of your income to that are helping meet the needs of world hunger and water shortage. And find a local need and meet it. People are hungry right here in our community. And those needs will grow as our community grows. When we do that we will see the Kingdom of God come on earth as it is in heaven. In the meantime, don’t cut out the poor from your Bibles. And don’t cut them out of your life.
Source: Huffington Post | Adam Phillips
I've spent the last year -- and especially so the last month -- hearing from LGBTQ parishioners, neighbors and friends their struggles growing up in the church. Horrible stories of anguish. Losing jobs, losing schools, losing friends and family. An unnecessary wreckage of human life in the name of faith.