thought exercise on Divisions

In the mid-2000s, a Trans-Atlantic movement emerged, characterized by a rejection of organized religion and the ascent of what came to be known as the “New Atheism.” This trend gained notable traction...

In 2014, researchers at Northwestern University, Boston College, and the University of Melbourne published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , a prestigious academ...

The solution to gender, race and social divisions is not to eradicate our differences but to see them in light of Jesus. The Pentecostal movement in the United States in the early twentieth century wa...

Our first president, George Washington, refused to run as a member of any political party. He wanted to be a president to all Americans. Washington firmly believed that political parties would divide ...

I was walking in San Francisco along the Golden Gate Bridge when I saw a man about to jump off. I tried to dissuade him from committing suicide and told him simply that God loved him. A tear came to h...

The last 80 years of American politics have unfortunately seen a dramatic increase in political polarization. One reporter likened the relationship between Republicans and Democrats to the famous Shak...

The farmers in the old prairie days used to prepare for a winter storm by putting up a rope between the house and the barn. They did this because they knew that in a swirling blizzard, even a brief di...

From 1992 to 1995 the world witnessed one of the worst civil conflicts, the Bosnian War. Three factions, each tied to a religion (Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks), began attacking...

In 1258, Islam stood on the brink of collapse, with Egypt as its last stronghold. While Islam was struggling, the vast Mongol Empire, under the rule of Kublai Khan, stretched from the Black Sea to the...

In his Rule for monasteries, St. Benedict considered grumbling a serious offense against community life. He wrote, “If a disciple grumbles, not only aloud but in his heart … his action will not ...

Jane Addams (1860–1935), a leading American social reformer, was a dedicated advocate for racial equality, women’s suffrage, and pacifism. In 1931, she was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1900,...

In 1970 John Perkins, an African American pastor and community organizer who lived on “the black side” of rural Mendenhall, Mississippi, was nearly beaten to death by white state police officers. The ...

While serving as President of the United States, Grover Cleveland fought constantly with the Senate, but got along rather well with the House of Representatives. A story circulated around town that on...

Ever since I became a Christian, I’ve met countless believers who treated their lives like the US government treats its various departments. In the US government, there is the Department of Education,...

I grew up in a Baptist church, and we looked forward to the day when we would be in heaven and there would be no more divisions. Some Lutherans would be there, represented by Martin Luther. Methodists...

In his book Breaking the Rules , Fil Anderson talks about the scandalous reputation of Jesus: He breaks all social etiquette in relating to people. He acknowledges no barriers or human divisions....

While the second example is a bit dated (Titanic is over approaching its third decade in circulation!) the logic holds and can be applied to a variety of films set in a historical context: I think of...

Christians in America must come to terms with how institutional racism has infected us. Few white persons in twenty-first-century America see themselves as racist. (Even fewer Asian, Latino, or Africa...

The etymology of the word race, as used with regard to people, can be traced only to the sixteenth century. Around 1500 the English word race carried the sense of a group with a common occupation; by ...

In his book, The Word and Power Church, Doug Banister writes: The spring of 1940 found Hitler’s panzer divisions mopping up French troops and preparing for a siege of Great Britain. The Dutch had al...

…I started reading The Kindness of God by Catholic theologian and philosopher Janet Soskice. In her examination of the etymology of the word kindness, Soskice helped me see it for the first time as a ...

In this wonderful interaction with a neighbor-turned-friend, the widow Miss Maudie Atikinson, Scout Finch tries to understand why some Baptists, called “foot washers” in the book, seem to shun most of...

I sense that mental illness resembles a bone fracture. Bones have remarkable durability, but also, once broken, can rapidly heal and be reset. With normal daily use, one might never be aware of past p...

In this short excerpt, the author and priest Robert Farrar Capon describes just how intricate and beautiful one single part of God’s creation is, the chicken egg: Forget for the moment the fantastic...

In Exclusion and Embrace , Yale professor Miroslav Volf reflects on the themes of revenge, mercy, forgiveness and grace. Volf, who grew up in war-ravaged Croatia, speaks from a place of deep concer...

In Paul’s day the church quarreled over the Jewish law and over genealogies, over meat sacrificed to idols and sabbath practices, and over favoritism shown to the rich patrons and negligence shown to ...

Maleness and femaleness is the fundamental way we carry our relational design. Interestingly, the English word sexuality comes from the Latin word sexus, which means “being divided, cut off, separated...

In 1973, Voice of Calvary Ministries, the ministry Vera Mae and I started after we moved back to Mississippi in 1960, opened a health clinic in the black section of Mendenhall. We had an X-ray machine...

In one of Aesop's familiar fables, an old man has several sons who are always fighting among themselves. He had often, but without success, exhorted them to live together in harmony. One day, he c...

While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically, these disciplines an...