arts and culture on Captives

We bring before you, O Lord, the troubles and perils of people and nations, the sighing of prisoners and captives, the sorrows of the bereaved, the necessities of strangers, the helplessness of the we...

Deacon or other leader With all our heart and with all our mind, let us pray to the Lord, saying "Lord, have mercy." For the peace from above, for the loving-kindness of God, and for the ...

Good and Gracious Lord, You hold us in the palm of Your strong hand, working all things for our good and to Your glory. There’s no place we can go that escapes Your notice and is hidden from Your lovi...

Who covets more, is evermore a slave.

The heart clings to collected treasure. Stored-up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry.

Have you ever wondered how people keep elephants, whether at a circus or as means of transport throughout Asia, from throwing off their shackles and marching to their own tune? A single metal chain is...

In his book Feminine Faces, Clovis Chappell wrote that when the Roman city of Pompeii was being excavated, the body of a woman was found mummified by the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. Her position...

[There] are social idols that capture the life of the city…overarching sinful narratives on which people rely. We have to exegete them. We have to spot them out. We have to capture their core values, ...

One Sunday morning at a Colorado prison, a group of inmates was being led to the Catholic and Protestant chapels. One young man, however, kept walking past them and headed toward the main gate. A guar...

The most poignant and powerful time for me in the film 12 Years a Slave was not when the beatings took place or the general degradation meted out to the hero as a matter of course or even the general ...

We are complicit and we do not even realize it, O Holy God. Every day we participate in systems of idolatry, and we promote the captivity of a nation to gods. We have bought the subtle lies of our cul...

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no o...

At the beginning of the third century in North Africa, persecution of Christians broke out in Carthage. One of the cate­chumens taken into custody was Perpetua, a noblewoman still nursing her son. Whe...

A possession ought to belong to the possessor, not the possessor to the possession.

The social location of enslaved persons caused them to read the Bible differently. This unabashedly located reading has marked African American interpretation since. Did this social location mean Blac...

The couple in the garden was to multiply, so providing the citizens of the city. Their cultivation of earth's resources as they extended their control over their territorial environment through th...

Members of the Natomo family sit on the flat roof of their mud house in Mali, Africa, posing for their early morning photograph. Their earthly belongings are arrayed in front of them. Two kettles, pla...

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothi...

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

The story goes like this: It’s the height of British colonialism. An English traveler lands in Africa, intent on a rapid journey into the jungle. He charters some local porters to carry his supplies. ...

The Shawshank Redemption contains a poignant scene in which a prisoner, Andy, locks himself into a restricted area and plays a record featuring opera singers. Beautiful music pours through the public ...

We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.

Frederick Douglass describes how the evils of slavery and racism acts as a sap on the integrity of both our country and our faith in a God where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free: Fello...

The exhausting manipulation and control it takes to protect an identity based on circumstances will crush our hearts and hide the best of who we are behind a wall of insecurity.

What is clear on all accounts is that a garden was an enclosed area designed for cultivation... [so] what we have, then, rather than an image of primitivism, is one of an area that is bounded, probabl...

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong...

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture. . . . Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

One of my favorite Bible illustrations of someone willing to go against the norms of society to befriend another based on love and forgiveness is found in the New Testament book of Philemon. It is a m...

One of the great leaders of the first generation after the apostles was a man named Polycarp. Polycarp, it is believed, was discipled by the apostle John and carried out a long and fruitful ministry i...

Let us treasure up in our soul some of those things which are permanent..., not of those which will forsake us and be destroyed, and which only tickle our senses for a little while.