In this issue of A Public Witness, we want to share some of what we’ve learned from our Unsettling Advent series this year. We hope these insights will be meaningful in these last few days before we celebrate the birth of Jesus.
Terrell Carter writes that unfortunately, mass shootings and other acts of violence have become an ordinary experience in our world. Some might say that this upward trend in violence epitomizes the “ordinariness of suffering,” the fact that violent things regularly occur in the world.
Angela Parker from Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology writes about the time that a complementarian invited her to lunch. Thinking through the genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel and Ware’s re-imagination makes her ask how certain segments of Christianity still stifle women’s ministry.
John Sianghio writes that we find hope in strange and unexpected places. There is something about sports, something about the stories of players like Hakimi and his mother, that captures the hearts and minds of the world and pierces our souls with its poignancy.
Adriene Thorne of Riverside Church writes that God’s people can choose to care for one another with lavish love and justice. That is the better world we dare to anticipate during Advent.
The Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations has asked Christians to evaluate their own theologies and teachings for anti-Jewish sentiments. Much of Christian preaching today acknowledges a Jewish Jesus born into an expressly Jewish context, but also implicitly paints a portrait of a Jesus whose
Thomas Lecaque writes that the AR-15 has been claimed as the sword Christ will wield in the Apocalypse. It is not a tool for revelation, but it is certainly a tool of Armageddon. It is a gun that ends worlds.
Jeremy Fuzy writes that it is an American tradition to believe in the myth of redemptive violence — the idea that we can get violence under control by using more violence. But state-sanctioned killings, whether by police or the death penalty, do nothing to stop
Brian Kaylor writes that ten years ago today an armed man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and opened fire. This massacre at Christmastime evokes memories of part of the biblical story we tend to leave out of our nativities and pageants.
The capital punishment system is often implemented and supported by those who currently celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. So in this issue of A Public Witness, we look at the state of the death penalty in the United States and introduce you