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By Kathryn Post
(RNS) — ‘The biggest lesson I had to learn is that God’s lack of an answer to my prayers to change me was an answer, because there was…
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The Mark of Cain: On Who Deserves to Live
By Morf Morford
Killing in the name of God should be the ultimate oxymoron – the most extreme self-canceling, obvious-to-all contradiction.
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The Ones Who Led the Way
By Amy C Roemer
It is through their testimony, their witness, that they passed down the faith we have today.
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Single and Ready to…Rethink Church, Family, and What It Means to Belong
It can be less lonely simply not going to church than going and trying to be a part of something that largely was not designed for you.
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Stewards of Our Home: A Litany for Our Interdependent Relationship with All of Creation
To be a true steward of a truly hospitable home means we must remember that sacredness.
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To Anyone Else Feeling Stuck in Perplexity
I used to think I was losing my faith, but now I think I’ve actually been growing it deeper all along. If that statement is relatable, this article is for…
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Cultivated Meat and the Prayer of Saint Francis
In the current moment, I don’t think there’s a more effective way to be an instrument of peace than pushing for federal funding for cultivated-meat research.
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Transcending Boundaries as People of Faith
By Morf Morford
God’s love, if we believe it, is unlimited and crosses every human-made boundary.
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We Must See No Stranger
By Valarie Kaur
Anti-blackness transcends political party; it permeates our culture and becomes keenly visible in moments like this.
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A Time to Grieve
Then I return to bearing witness, recognizing that there is indeed a time for grief, and we are in that time.
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Drawing My Own Map in a Post-Evangelical World
For someone who thrives on order and stability, drawing my own map is more than navigating uncharted territory. It’s calling me to trust myself, trust God, and believe that the…
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Money and Activism: Faith-Fueled Investing to Fight Climate Change
As someone who has been in advocacy work for a while, I’ve begun to wonder how much all this ‘righteous anger’ accomplishes if we don’t learn to examine our own…
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Hope for Hunger: We can Answer the Moral Call to End Malnutrition
By Mark Viso
I believe in our country’s ability to boldly lead an effective global response to food security and adequate nutrition and this initiative offers a blueprint for faith-based and U.S. government…
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Bearing Witness as the First Step to Justice
Being a faithful witness means listening to survivors and believing them at their word without shaming, criticizing, or belittling.
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Bishop Barber’s Remarks to the Vatican Conference on Ending Poverty
I am honored to be here at the Vatican on the feast of St. Francis to share with you on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for…
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Dazzling and Cruel Transitions Out of Homelessness
There is an aspect of health and wholeness that cannot be defined by Maslow or medicine or psychology during transitions like this.
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Facing Our Shattered State
By Bob Ekblad
What will it take for people to finally acknowledge our broken, shattered state?
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Jesus Among the Insurrectionists
It is good and right to speak out against harmful distortions of the way of Jesus, but Jesus invites us to go further than that.
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The Only Way is Through
I had no clue why something in me snapped. Then a couple of months ago, I picked up Brian McLaren’s book Faith After Doubt.
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Seeking Wholeness: Moving Beyond the Abortion Debate
Maybe when we stop arguing over legality, we’ll be able to see the women and the children who are caught between the battle lines.
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Why Are There So Many Toxic Pastors?
By Jon Mathieu
What’s wrong with us? Why do we keep empowering, following, and fawning over this type of leader?
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Reaching Past the Obvious to Find Belonging
The challenge, then, is for us to go beyond the surface-level labels we wear, to go beyond visible markers of identity.
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American Altar: Poetry, Gun Violence, and the Gods to Whom We Sacrifice
We Americans are much slower to see the idols of our own times and cultures.
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Pastor of . . . Doubt?
The life of those who follow Jesus can be beautiful and amazing, and that beauty almost always includes doubt.
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Why Do You Say You Love Jesus?
By Morf Morford
What I really want to know is why this “love” so often doesn’t look like love; why this “faith” doesn’t look like faith. Would they say, “It’s not about what…
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In Opposition of the Line 3 Pipeline
Now, four years later, I want to follow up the heartfelt message of that video by expressing my public opposition to the Line 3 pipeline — and by asking you…
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The Wrong Debate: On Alabama’s New Gas Chamber
By Chris Brown
As states grapple with how to resume killing, the only debate seems to be over the method.
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Women of Faith Can Help Advance Climate Justice
Even though I am not a climate scientist, I recognize that the climate crisis is an existential threat impacting all of creation. As a woman and a person of faith,…
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A Love Song for the Long-Haul: LA UMC Pastors on Hurricane Ida Aftermath
The journey ahead is complex and rightly so—filled with both triage and rehab efforts, insurance claims and bucket truck parades, adrenaline highs and compassion fatigue, questions about climate change and…
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What I Learned About God by Praying for Osama bin Laden
Like every other college student and most Americans, I didn’t know the name Osama bin Laden. I also didn’t know God.
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The Amnesia of ‘Never Forget’
Abroad, “never forget” hides a slow forgetting of the universal morality to which we once aspired as a country.
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Faith Leaders Gather in Houston in Response to Gun Violence
By Kathryn Post
The Red Letter Christians’ gathering went on despite the cancellation of the NRA event.
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Kayla Craig is Resourcing Parents for These Times
For those worried about their kids in these days of active shooter drills and other unsettling events, Kayla Craig fearlessly opens doors into frightening scenarios. How do we pray about…
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The New American Revival: Christian Nationalism’s ‘Delta Variant’
Many will say it’s all about freedom, but it’s really about power.
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The Morning After Ida Makes Landfall, a Prayer
By Patrice Gopo
Some days I wake in the morning disoriented, my mind mixing up my dreamscape with the reality of what transpires in life. In my dreamscape, my arms reach for a…
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For Afghanistan, Hospitality is the Least We Should Do
By Bill Mefford
This knowledge should lead us to lament the terrible damage we have caused, and this should then shape how we move forward.
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Healing Our Divides: Why This Matters
In large part, that’s why we become so persistently polarized, and that’s why our divisions can intensify to the point of mutual fear, hatred, and hellish violence.
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How Should the Church Respond to the Tents That Line Our Urban Streets?
Until we begin to ascribe to the people we’re attempting to “serve” the same kinds of complexities, nuances, kindnesses, and curiosity that we ascribe and acknowledge in ourselves, we will…
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With Red and Blue Fingerprints on Afghanistan Horror, a Call to Grieve
By Mark Bauer
Acknowledge the brokenness that could produce such gut-wrenching darkness. Internalize. And then get to work . . .
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God of Liminal Space
God was in that spot. God was in the most mundane, powerless, painful place.
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Roots of Justice
Much of the healing involves acknowledging that institutions, not just people, are racist.
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How Sunday Schools Can Help Prevent Gun Violence
As we return to Sunday School or youth programming, we have an opportunity — whether it takes place in person or online — to inform and educate families as we…
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‘Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue’: Positions of Power & Torah Justice
By Cory Driver
We must ensure that those in power do not succumb to human weakness, depriving those in their charge of the justice that God so passionately wants for all.
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Stewarding Our Privilege for the Kingdom of God
Unbridled privilege destroys our witness and credibility in the world, prohibiting disciples from taking on the mindset of Christ, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and seeking the peace and prosperity…
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The Practice of Prayer vs. the Prayer of Practice
Even though I don’t do much planned-praying these days, the action of following Jesus does sometimes draw desperate prayers out of me.
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Speak Love, Not War
Why is it that our modern church culture identifies faith with the language of pain, aggression, and domination more so than with nurturing peace and equality?
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How Mormonism Can Save America
By Jana Riess
Mormonism teaches me that I don’t get to excommunicate folks from my world just because we disagree. And I am so, so glad of it.
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The Christian Right and the Decline of White Evangelicalism
In short, the quantitative and qualitative evidence – and, I will add, my own anecdotal evidence – strongly support the argument that the Christian Right has been a primary factor…
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Worth Fighting For: A Word from the Desens House
By Dean Wright
Standing in the midst of that house in chaos felt like a refection on the chaos of my soul over the past few years. After being very active in our…
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Jesus, Justice, and the Suffering of the Marginalized
By David Piorek
Yet, where we see suffering, we often see Jesus. Jesus’ arrival in the Gerasenes shows us how he breaks into the marginalized areas of our societies where those who are…
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The Violence of a Religious Minority’s Majority
By Todd Johnson
Where is the enlightenment in using force to preserve the way of life for a minority that will not espouse these self-evident truths? Where is the justice in allowing this…
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The Calling of Transformation
By Morf Morford
These are the people who follow the calling we are all called to follow: to leave a trail of transformation wherever we go. There is no greater calling.
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The Racist Policing of China and the United States
Two massive injustices happening against two different groups of people in two different nations of the world should be equally addressed, simultaneously lamented, and simultaneously confronted.
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Evangelicals Dangerous Understanding of Jesus
Given their belief in a limited amount of available goods and resources in the world, coupled with the cultural belief that, because everyone was created in the image of God,…
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Announcing a Season of Nonviolent Moral Direct Action
If we cannot refuse cooperation with voter suppression now, we have no hope of representation in the coming decade that will work to address the interconnected crises of climate catastrophe,…
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The Uncomfortable In-Between
By RLC Editor
Discomfort leads us to a place where we are bothered when we compare what we have to what others don’t have.
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Mother Earth Has Suffered Enough: We Need Stronger Methane Rules
Rains and snows came when they were supposed to, bringing much needed refreshing to our community and land. Now, we are in a prolonged drought. We are in a national…
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Violence & Victory
By Gena Thomas
Violence is a byproduct of victory in the prosperity-scarcity framework, as people are subconsciously taught to seek prosperity at all costs. But seeking justice requires us to lay down our…
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3 Roots of Discrimination in God’s Church
By Todd Lollar
You may be surprised what people deem as secular society is not where I’ve experienced the most discrimination as a person who is differently abled.
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To Get Our Nation Back On Track, We Need A ‘Holy Recovery’
Scarcity has been the name of the game for far too long in American politics. We are constantly offered a choice between which group of people is forced to go…
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Blessing a Cultural Threshold
By Dori Baker
A threshold is a place of letting go of an old identity and waiting on a new identity to emerge. It is a liminal moment when the sacred is being…
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The Religion of Jesus
By Sarah Lawing
Through the writings of Howard Thurman, I have learned what I have always known. The religion of Jesus has always been about desiring a more equitable and just society, which…
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Walking in the Shadow
We have experienced a long night where we have been brought face-to-face with the staggering inequities pervading our society. No longer are we able to say we didn’t know, for…
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Christian Leaders from Around the Country Read Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech
By RLC Editor
One-hundred and sixty-nine years ago today, abolitionist, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass gave a speech to the 600 members of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society entitled “What to the Slave…
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Christian Leaders from Around the Country Reading FREDERICK DOUGLASS’ 1852 speech “WHAT TO THE SLAVE IS THE FOURTH OF JULY” (Read on July 3, 2021)
By RLC Editor
One-hundred and sixty-nine years ago today, abolitionist, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass gave a speech to the 600 members of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society entitled “What to the Slave…
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Brian McLaren, Doubt, and Decoding
It’s time, McLaren says with a clear tone of fearless urgency. In a world riddled with division, stuffed with nuclear warheads, and barrelling down a storyline of extinction, we need…
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Liturgy for Flag Removers
May we not litter our sacred spaces with the flags that we do not (ought not) worship. Christ, have mercy on our American dreams.
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Nationalism and the Undermining of Global Missions
By Bill Mefford
Thus, what I have strongly urged my evangelical Christian missionary friends serving in other countries to do is to lovingly and strongly confront the nationalism of their supporters.
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I’m not a ‘Real’ Man: Jesus, John Wayne, and Disability
By Sy Hoekstra
The background is that I am blind, and have been since I was very young. I was never going to be a soldier, police officer, cowboy, or any of it.
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3 Things the Church Probably Didn’t Teach You About Sex
By Andrew Lee
There is so much more the church can do to celebrate sexual relationships. Sex should be talked about in the church. We won’t always get it exactly right, but I…
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A Time for Shalom
By Nathan Hunt
Six days a week we struggle for freedom. On the Sabbath, we sit in the liberating truth that we are already free. And as we dwell in Sabbath freedom, the…
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Propositional Church in a Wounded World
By Morf Morford
What were those “statements of faith” in the light of tragedy? Social upheaval? Personal challenges? Difficult relationships? Crisis? Or even encounters with wonder and discovery?
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Ten Ways to Resist a Dictatorship
By RLC Editor
This is our inheritance and our legacy. No matter what, our motherland will never lack in courage. Thank you for bearing witness to our resistance.
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Consistent and Faithful Witnesses
By Emily Jones
Racial justice is a necessary part of the substantive call of discipleship, part of who we are called to be – day after day, year after year.
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The Church Is Not a Business
By Sarah Styf
Ministry cannot happen without financial support from the very people who are participating in that ministry. But how should we handle Christian organizations when the survival of the institution comes…
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How the Year of Jubilee Challenges Us to Confront Monopoly Power
Although the Law was given specifically to a certain group of people in a certain cultural, political, and historical context, we can still study it to understand and apply what…
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Lovers of Peace Must Organize
By Mike Martin
The United States is unique to the world in our gun ownership, with nearly 400 million guns, more than one per resident. The prevalence of guns is not by accident.
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The ‘Single-Issue Voter Club’ and the Fight Against Gun Violence
Please, for the love of God, for the sake of those not yet killed by the next mass shooting, consider becoming a “single issue voter.”
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Overturn Dylann Roof’s Death Sentence — for Me, Not for Him
Without a death sentence, as I understand, there is just one appeal, after which we never have to hear the killer’s name again.
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Why We’re Glad Our Publisher Isn’t Backing The ‘God Bless The USA’ Bible
As authors published by Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins Christian Publishing known for its NIV Bibles, and activists against Christian nationalism, we were alarmed at this news, first reported by…
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Struggle is Faithfulness: Thoughts from Inside Chronic Illness
However, is God directly responsible for one person’s healing while another suffers or dies? When God gets credit for the first outcome but not the second, it leaves the second…
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The City on a Hill: Jerusalem Divided
The Holy Land will continue experiencing an unholy maintenance of occupation by force, only limited by violent interventions.
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Christian Faith Leader Sign-On to End the Federal Death Penalty
By RLC Editor
Editor’s Note: Our friends and co-conspirators at Death Penalty Action have invited Christian Faith Leaders to sign the petition below. You’ll also find several resources for taking action following the petition…
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John Wayne, Jesus, and The End of Innocence
The short answer, according to Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, is that a man like Donald Trump is exactly whom they were expecting. Nothing like Jesus. But a lot like…
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Minimalism and the Christian Life
My working definition of minimalism is a focus on the aspects of life that matter most and intentionally removing everything else. What, then, are the aspects of life that matter most?
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Tired of Looking for the Exit
There are kids, teens, and adults at your church that are LGBTQ+. They’re wondering if there’s a place for them. And more will be coming. Or maybe they won’t. Not…
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Come to Me All You Who are Angry
Sketch drawn from a photograph in the Associated Press. A woman in the crowd lowers her mask to wail when she hears the grand jury decision regarding the death of…
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Come to Me All You Who are Angry
By RLC Editor
During the last recession – the one they called “great” – I lost my home to foreclosure. I also lost my savings to survival, my credit to bankruptcy, a best…
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Seeking Other Seas
By Paul Demer
I can’t understand much of what he’s saying, though I desperately wish I could. In this small way, I catch a glimpse of the culture shock that awaits the luckiest…
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My Breast Cancer Revealed a Mothering God
Now that I am in the post treatment phase punctuated by periodic check-ups, the everydayness of cancer has receded. In its wake, however, I am left with an indelible mark.…
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We Shouldn’t Know Their Names
The dead become a statistic that we debate regarding who has the right idea about what they did and did not deserve, and in so doing we convince ourselves that…
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The Christians Who Cannot Mourn Ma’Khia Bryant
By Sy Hoekstra
Only syncretized faiths value the supremacy of human laws. We value truth. The truth is that the state took another Black girl from her family under the pretense of safety,…
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Good Fruit and Where We’ve Gotten It Wrong
LBGTQ youth from religious backgrounds are three times more likely to attempt suicide than their unchurched LGBTQ peers. This ought to be a wake up call for the church. This…
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Black Deaths Matter
By Morf Morford
Our media obsession with the taking of life (whether fictional or under the guise of “news”) literally defines our culture and era. And nothing captures our attention, passion, clicks, and…
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A Review of #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing
Allison’s work should compel Christians to contemplate the destruction wrought by purity culture, in our churches and homes and summer camps and institutions: in other words, every place where people…
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Pat Robertson’s Not Woke, He’s the Reason You Should Be
So a moment where someone is able to condemn murder and distinguish a Glock from a Taser might be retweeted or shared thousands of times, but it is not confession,…
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Why I Left and Why I Stayed
I wish though I could go back to that young girl, sitting in that big arena with all its grandeur. I wish I could invite her to a quiet, less…
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‘Go and Do Likewise’: Pursuing the Biblical Call to Justice
Who would your ‘Samaritan’ be today? A politician? A troll on Twitter? A violent terrorist? A police officer? An anarchist? Someone with a different sexual orientation?
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Hatred Toward Asian Americans is Not a New Evil
White supremacy is at the heart of anti-Asian hatred.
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No ‘Normal’ Way to Heal
No one fully appreciates normal until it is taken away, and often normal slips away in the blink of an eye with little warning or preparation.
