Join us as we celebrate five years of our ‘A Public Witness’ newsletter and highlight the best from the 115 pieces we’ve published over the past 12 months exploring the intersection of faith, culture, and politics.
In addition, ‘The Surprising Story of How Speaker Johnson Read a Fake Jefferson Prayer’ won the magazine feature category and Best in Class for Writing for Periodicals and our Unsettling Advent devotionals won the editorial series category and Best in Class for Specialized Writing.
In these unsettling times of hatred and violence as rulers rage like Herod, may we stand in the ruins of the empire and lift our voices. For unto us a child is born.
In our familiarity with the birth narrative, we often do not consider the long-term consequences for the secondary figures in the story. It was an unsettling time that left long and permanent scars on their lives.
Advent reminds us that God comes into a world already organized by power and exclusion — and does not accept its terms. If Christianity is used today to justify separation, the gospel calls us back to its center.
The cruel spectacle churns on for now, but Advent prepares us to see anew that there are countless ordinary acts of love happening quietly, out of sight, more than you and I will ever know.
We should all be concerned about government officials anointing themselves as the arbiters of what a Nativity scene should look like. Sadly, too many Christians today willingly side with Herod.
It must have seemed hopeless in first-century Palestine for plenty of people, but that is where the light of the world chooses to be born. God is still coming into being, even amidst the cruelty of ICE and the terror of state violence.
Jesus didn’t say ‘peace’ because the disciples were safe or because the soldiers went away, but precisely because they were waiting outside and yet peace was still possible.
The season of Advent urges us to slow down; to dwell in the fullness of God’s good news. God offers us life-affirming joy even as calamity follows crisis like an ever-unspooling tragedy.