There’s a refrain in one of the songs we sing at our church that goes like this “I am who you say I am.” It’s a rather simple line, but a lesson that takes a lifetime to live out. Most of us begin with: “I am who my parents say I...
All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis, the more serious the sifting and the deeper the questions it...
Peter Storey, the former Methodist bishop and president of the South African Council of Churches, a white man who opposed apartheid, tells a story about a party at which he and Archbishop Desmond Tutu were the honored guests. It was hosted by black South Africans who...
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without much thought. Your habitus is trained into you starting from...
In his book Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth, Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo. While watching his daughter get “inked,” Halter asked the tattoo artist (named Sean) a very interesting...