At the end of Part One, I suggested that the deepest crisis facing us may not be political, economic or ecological. It may be moral and spiritual. We are confronting profound challenges at precisely the moment when we seem least able to agree on what kind of people we ought to be. That raises an obvious question: how should Christians respond? The temptation is either panic or retreat. Panic fills our attention with headlines, outrage and endless speculation about what might

Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Standing on the Mount of Olives, looking across the valley towards the city, he saw more than stone walls, crowded streets and the gleaming Temple. He saw where the road was leading. He saw a society becoming brittle. He saw tensions hardening. He saw a people losing their capacity for peace. And Jesus wept. "If only you had known on this day what makes for peace." Within a generation Jerusalem would burn. The Temple would be destroyed. The city tha

“And now I know that none of you among whom I have gone about preaching the kingdom will ever see me again…. They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him. What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again. Then they accompanied him to the ship.” Acts 20:25, 37–38 (NIV) In Acts 20, Paul meets with the Ephesian elders on a beach at Miletus. He reminds them of the years they have shared together—the tears, the trials, the ministry, the life t

I write poetry because I believe imagination matters. Not as an escape from reality, but as a way of returning to it. ……. Walter Brueggemann describes the prophetic task as seeking “to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” That has become something of a compass for me over the years. The older I get, the more I wonder if many of our deepest problems begin in the imagination

My friend and colleague Liz Harden was teaching last night on the Mission, Theology and Ministry for the Margins course about trauma. It was on Zoom, and even through a screen you could feel at points how heavy the subject was. But you could also hear from the feedback and conversations afterwards how much students appreciated somebody speaking honestly about it. It got me thinking again about church culture. If I am honest, I think some churches struggle with trauma because