The Christian Century back issues from April 2008:
Good sermon, Reverend.(Editor's DESK)
Apr 08, 2008; ... MARTIN COPENHAVER'S insightful "Handshake ritual" (p. 22) catches the preacher's attention. The more I am in this business the more ambivalent I feel about the traditional ritual of greeting worshipers after the service. I know myself well enough to understand how much I love those ...
Border truths.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Apr 08, 2008; ... At last! A public statement about the wall being built along our border with Mexico ("Wall of shame," Feb. 12). Newspapers, commentators, politicians and theologians should have been flooding this country with articles against this "method" of dealing with the immigration problem, but ...
Practice vs. orientation ...(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Apr 08, 2008; ... I was dismayed to read the news item concerning Lisa Larges's bid to become ordained to the ministry of the Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) ("Presbytery OKs first step for lesbian's ordination," Feb. 12). The item states that Larges "has twice been denied ordination ...
Polkinghorne and miracles ...(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Apr 08, 2008; ... I'm a mathematician and a Jew, and my notion of miracle may be a bit different from that of the physicist and priest John Polkinghorne (Michael Fitzgerald, "Physicist and priest," Jan. 29). I have a view closer to that of Gregory Jones ("Spiritual soccer," Jan. 29), who sees something ...
Wall on Israel ...(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Apr 08, 2008; ... It was shocking and disconcerting to read James Wall's endorsement of a position that, by refusing to accept Israel's identity as a Jewish state, implicitly rejects the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty and self-determination in their ancient homeland ("Peace brokers," Dec. 25). ...
Tortured logic.
Apr 08, 2008 ... Though President Bush has repeatedly maintained that the U.S. does not engage in torture, his administration continues to equivocate. It has insisted that terrorists need not be treated like ordinary combatants. It has admitted to practicing waterboarding (simulated drowning) and refuses ...
Transforming losses.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... TRANSFORMING LOSSES: When David Fajgenbaum was a freshman at Georgetown University, his mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. Before she died, he decided to honor her by forming a support group, Students of Ailing Mothers and Fathers. He discovered that his peers found the group useful ...
No pretense.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... NO PRETENSE: In giving advice to younger religious educators, Thomas H. Groome recalls the incident in which John the Baptist was asked whether he was the much-anticipated Messiah (John 1:19-20). John responded, "I am not the Messiah." Groome suggests that educators make John's ...
Aid for the poor.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... AID FOR THE POOR: It is a myth that abject poverty can't be eradicated in out lifetime, says Mark Lange. The number of people worldwide who survive on less than $1 a day dropped 27 percent between 1981 and 2001. And whereas abject poverty was once spread all over the world, it is now ...
Irony of it all.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... IRONY OF IT ALL: Last year Eliot Spitzer, the now-disgraced former governor of New York, gave a speech titled "The Need for Both Passion and Humility in Politics." Expounding on the dangers of ...
Muslim caucus?(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... MUSLIM CAUCUS? Indianapolis voters chose Andre Carson to fill a seat vacated by his late grandmother, making him the second Muslim ever elected to serve in Congress. Like Representative Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), who in 2006 became the first Muslim elected to Congress, Carson is a black ...
Moving on.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... MOVING ON: On average, Americans move 11.7 times in their lifetime. About 40 percent of native-born Americans don't live in the state in which they were born. Americans, Christopher Clausen argues, move not only for practical reasons, such as a job change, but because they're trying to ...
Enough to make you swear.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU SWEAR: California State University at East Bay fired Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker mathematics instructor, because she refused to sign an unaltered state loyalty oath. In previous teaching positions she would sign the oath, but add her own modifiers so as to align it ...
Caveat lector.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... CAVEAT LECTOR: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, is used by more people than Amazon or eBay. It's immensely popular because it has 2.2 million articles and is constantly growing, thanks to the thousands of volunteers who contribute to it, and it is often one of the first results in ...
Drug heads.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... DRUG HEADS: While sports fans debate the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes, academics have debated the use of drugs to enhance intellectual performance. Two Cambridge University researchers reported that about a dozen of their colleagues admit to using Adderall, a stimulant, ...
Strange love.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... STRANGE LOVE: David Levy, an artificial-intelligence researcher from London, thinks the rime is coming when humans will hook up with robots for love, sex and even marriage. "If the alternative is that you are lonely and sad and miserable, is it not better to find a robot that claims to ...
Beloved community.(Trinity UCC's Otis Moss III)(Interview)
Apr 08, 2008 ... TRINITY UNITED Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago has received a great deal of media attention because one of its members is presidential candidate Barack Obama. The head pastor of the 8,000-member church is Otis Moss III, 36, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, who recently ...
The fixer-upper church.(Ministry on the margins)
Apr 08, 2008; ... WHEN I GO to church these +days, I have to walk on makeshift sidewalks alongside walls of plywood boards that surround a construction area, and underneath heavy-duty scaffolding that juts out over the building's front steps and up to the base of the steeple. When Trinity Evangelical ...
Evensong.(Lyrics)
Apr 08, 2008; ... <Pre>All winter the fish lounge at the bottom of the pondsquinting up now and then toward the cloudy lightbeyond the ice, but mostly skulking behind cold wet shadowslike teenage guys down in the basementhanging out, waiting for life to happendreaming elongated ...
Glimpsing the future.(Dispatch from Hong Kong)
Apr 08, 2008; ... WHILE ATTENDING a conference in Hong Kong I spent a free afternoon looking for signs of the vibrant Asian Christianity that we've heard so much about recently. If writers such as Philip Jenkins (The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity) and David Aikman (Jesus in Beijing: ...
Aging tulips.(Poem)
Apr 08, 2008; ... <Pre> Aging tulips See, it's not sweet youththat touts a wildness, but crazyold age. Beauty shifts. Plumppink petals fall away, or stay,curling every which way,like stiff, unruly hair, driedto a deep blood-red. ...
Episcopal seminaries adjust to realities.(CENTURY news)
Apr 08, 2008; ... The deans of Episcopal seminaries warned bishops and other church leaders last year that their theological schools must deal creatively with hard financial realities. The schools can no longer function separately as "11 little grocery stores trying to sell the same products to the church," ...
Despite church pleas, Bush vetoes bill to ban harsh interrogation.(CENTURY news)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Calling tough interrogation methods a "valuable tool" in the war on terrorism, President Bush last month vetoed a bill to outlaw waterboarding in a rebuke to congressional Democrats and mainstream church leaders, including signers of a "United Methodists Do Not Torture" petition. ...
Polish priest-scientist wins Templeton Prize.(CENTURY news)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Michael Heller, a Polish Roman Catholic priest and cosmologist whose intellectual and religious life has been grounded in the insights of both science and religion, has won the 2008 Templeton Prize. At about $1.6 million, it is believed to be the largest yearly monetary award given to a ...
McCain seeks support of GOP conservatives.(CENTURY news)(John McCain, Grand Old Party)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president despite opposition from Focus on the Family leader James Dobson and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, traveled to New Orleans last month seeking support from conservative true believers. "We've got to get our ...
Antihunger Souper Bowl runs up the score again.(CENTURY news)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... The annual "Souper Bowl" antihunger campaign broke another record in donations this year--reaching $9.5 million from 14,654 congregations by March 5, officials said. Started by a Presbyterian pastor in South Carolina on Super Bowl Sunday in 1955, the campaign has raised nearly ...
Methodist church in D.C. to recognize gay unions.(CENTURY news)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... A United Methodist congregation in Washington, D.C., the church attended by President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton, has changed its policy to recognize--but not "celebrate"--same-gender partnerships. Foundry United Methodist Church's senior pastor, Dean Snyder, ...
Southern Baptist group shifts position on climate.(CENTURY news)
Apr 08, 2008 ... A group of Southern Baptist leaders has launched a new initiative on the environment, saying that their denomination's past declarations have been "too timid." "We believe our current denominational resolutions and engagement with these issues have often been too timid, failing ...
Gay bishop Robinson, barred from Lambeth, will be around anyway.(CENTURY news)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... EPISCOPAL BISHOP V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, a flashpoint of controversy within the Anglican Communion for being a partnered gay bishop, said he turned down an offer from fellow U.S. bishops to be on the margins of this summer's Lambeth Conference in London--allowed to appear in the ...
The United Church of Christ has retained a former U.S. solicitor general to represent the church during an Internal Revenue Service investigation of its political activities.(Briefly noted)(Seth P. Waxman)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... The United Church of Christ has retained a former U.S. solicitor general to represent the church during an Internal Revenue Service investigation of its political activities. Seth P. Waxman, who represented the U.S. government before the Supreme Court from 1997 to 2001, will lead a team of ...
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has picked Emory University to house its documents and archival materials, most of them dating from 1968 to 1977 during the terms of SCLC presidents Ralph David Abernathy and Joseph Lowery.(Briefly noted)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has picked Emory University to house its documents and archival materials, most of them dating from 1968 to 1977 during the terms of SCLC presidents Ralph David Abernathy and Joseph ...
Chaldean Catholic archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of the northern Iraq city of Mosul, who was kidnapped in late February by armed attackers, has been found dead, church officials in Baghdad have announced.(Briefly noted)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Chaldean Catholic archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of the northern Iraq city of Mosul, who was kidnapped in late February by armed attackers, bas been found dead, church officials in Baghdad have announced. "We found him lifeless near Mosul. His abductors had buried him," the Rome-based SIR ...
A young Nepali girl worshiped by many Buddhists and Hindus as a kumari, or "living goddess," has renounced her divine role following a request from her family, an official in Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, said March 2.(Briefly noted)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... A young Nepali girl worshiped by many Buddhists and Hindus as a kumari, or "living goddess," has renounced her divine role following a request from her family, an official in Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, said March 2. Sajani Shakya, 11, who was revered for nine years as the kumari of the ...
Tim Goeglein, a key liaison between the White House and conservative Christians for seven years, resigned February 29 after plagiarism charges surfaced against him.(People)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Tim Goeglein, a key liaison between the White House and conservative Christians for seven years, resigned February 29 after plagiarism charges surfaced against him. In a blog that day, Nancy Nall, a former columnist for the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, noted similarities between a ...
Britain's United Reformed Church.(People)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Britain's United Reformed Church has appointed Roberta Rominger, who trained in California as a cellist and was ordained there by the United Church of Christ, as its general secretary. She is the first woman to hold the post in the 100,000-member church, which has 700 paid and unpaid ...
Robert Walker, 95, who founded and edited prominent Christian magazines, died March 1 in Carol Stream, Illinois.(People)(Obituary)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Robert Walker, 95, who founded and edited prominent Christian magazines, died March 1 in Carol Stream, Illinois. Walker, who had suffered from dementia and Parkinson's disease, was editor emeritus of Charisma & ...
Lukas Vischer, 81, a Presbyterian scholar who directed the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order office from 1965 to 1979, died March 11.(People)(Obituary)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Lukas Vischer, 81, a Presbyterian scholar who directed the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order office from 1965 to 1979, died March 11. His death came 19 days after the passing of his successor in that ...
Ruth Stafford Peale, the cofounder of the inspirational magazine Guideposts and widow of author and minister Norman Vincent Peale, died February 6 at her home in Pawling, New York.(People)(Obituary)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008 ... Ruth Stafford Peale, the cofounder of the inspirational magazine Guideposts and widow of author and minister Norman Vineent Peale, died February 6 at her home in Pawling, New York. Peale, who was 101, was called the "first lady of positive thinking" after her husband wrote the best-selling ...
Living by the word: reflections on the lectionary.
Apr 08, 2008; ... Sunday, April 13 Acts 2:42-47 I HAVE ABSOLUTELY nothing new to say about the 23rd Psalm or the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, and most readers have little need to rehash what they've already learned. What I don't know much about, and what many of us fear to ...
Handshake ritual: Ministry at the church door.(Cover story)
Apr 08, 2008; ... WORSHIP IS OVER and I am standing in the doorway shaking hands. In front of me is a couple I do not recall seeing before. I say, "Good morning! I'm Martin Copenhaver." By my manner and my tone of voice you might think that I am greeting long-lost friends, rather than introducing myself to ...
Salvation workout: how I found the virtues.
Apr 08, 2008; ... LATELY I'VE BEEN getting invitations to speak to youth about the virtues, so I've been trying to recall my own early training on the subject. I grew up in a Lutheran church, and much of who I am can be traced back to those second- and third-generation Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and German ...
The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.(Book review)
Apr 08, 2008; ... The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. By Mark Lilla. Knopf, 352 pp., $26.00. A lengthy prepublication excerpt in the New York Times Magazine, quotations on the back cover from famous scholars using descriptions like "profound," "elegant and erudite" and ...
What the Thunder Said: A Novella and Stories.(Book review)
Apr 08, 2008; ... What the Thunder Said: A Novella and Stories. By Janet Peery. St. Martin's Press, 320 pp., $24.95. Janet Peery's work is reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson's: intimate studies rich in character, spare in incident, powerfully rendered in plain speech and deceptively simple ...
God Is Dead.(Book review)
Apr 08, 2008; ... God Is Dead. By Ron Currie Jr. Viking, 192 pp., $21.95. Ever since Nietzsche made his famous pronouncement, theologians have wrung their hands over the metaphorical death of God. Yet what if God's death were no metaphor? What if it were a documented event headlining every ...
Our World.(Book review)
Apr 08, 2008; ... Our World. By Mary Oliver, with photographs by Molly Malone Cook. Beacon, 96 pp., $24.95. The work of Mary Oliver is one of those rare and lovely convergences. She is a lyric artist with a riveted eye and an enormous heart, one of the nation's great spiritual sentinels. She was ...
The Counterfeiters.(Movie review)
Apr 08, 2008; ... The Counterfeiters. Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. The Austrian picture The Counterfeiters, which won this year's Academy Award for best foreign film, dramatizes yet another little-known story of the Holocaust. In "Operation Bernhard" the Nazis assembled a select band of ...
Juno.(Movie review)
Apr 08, 2008; ... Juno. Directed by Jason Reitman. Starring Ellen Page and Michael Cera. Diablo Cody won an Academy Award for her screenplay for Juno, and it's true that the film bubbles along on the strength of the snappy, frank commentary that Juno (Ellen Page) offers on the travails of being ...
Seeing in Shadows.(ON Art)(Brief article)
Apr 08, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Seeing in Shadows, by Jan L. Richardson Torn and rough corrugated cardboard is allowed to be just that. Black ink rolled onto the surface doesn't hide its nature. Hinges make a straightforward statement about doors opened and closed. There's an ...
Crime wave.(M.E.M.O)( International Bulletin of Missionary Research )(Periodical review)
Apr 08, 2008; ... I WAIT EACH YEAR for the January issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research with its "Table C. Status of global mission, presence, and activities, AD 1800-2025." Each year my eye falls on Table C's saddest line, Line 62: "Ecclesiastical crime, $." Before me is Vol. 32, No ....
Hard words.(Editor's DESK)(on Jeremiah Wright)(Editorial)
Apr 22, 2008; ... I WISH Jeremiah Wright had made his point about America's failings without saying "God damn America." But not for a moment do I wish he had been less prophetic. The great biblical prophets did and said outrageous, controversial things, which consistently got them in trouble and ...
Taking on Darwin.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Apr 22, 2008; ... Neither Jason Byassee ("Dinosaurs in the garden") nor Amy Frykholm ("God in evolution") focuses on what I see as the principal challenge of Darwinism (Feb. 12). What was distinctive about Charles Darwin was not his embrace of evolution (his grandfather had contended that all ...
The Wright context.(Jeremiah Wright)
Apr 22, 2008 ... If you were to visit Trinity United Church of Christ, a predominantly African-American congregation on the Chicago's South Side, you would be warmly welcomed. You'd experience spirited singing that comes deep from the soul. You'd feel the palpable pain of the people, many of whom live in ...
Hound of heaven.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 22, 2008 ... Poet Mary Karr has chronicled her life growing up in a dysfunctional family in two best-selling memoirs (The Liar's Club and Cherry). In an interview with Image (Winter), she reports that she's at work on a third memoir that will likely bring her life up to the point when she came to faith ...
Liberty at home and abroad.(CENTURY marks)(religious freedom in the foreign policy)(Brief article)
Apr 22, 2008 ... The story of religious freedom in the U.S. is one of the nation's success stories, but religion is either largely ignored or viewed as a problem by American foreign policy scholars and practitioners, according to Thomas E Farr, author of World of Faith and Freedom: Why Religious Liberty Is ...
Give it away now.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 22, 2008 ... When the editors of Kiplinger's Personal Finance (April) interviewed Bill Gross, a very successful bond fund manager, they discovered that he was more excited about giving away money than making it. Gross, 63, credited his wife for doing the research for ...
Strange country.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 22, 2008 ... A country singer who wears a cowboy hat, hails from a small town in Oklahoma and sings with a twang--nothing unusual about that. What is unusual about Kareem Salama is that he is a country singer who is a devout Muslim. And he has a law degree from the University of Iowa and ...
Cruel justice.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 22, 2008 ... Debbie Shank was an employee of Wal-Mart when she suffered brain damage in a traffic accident. She will have to stay in a nursing home the rest of her life. The trucking company involved in the accident gave Shank a settlement payment of which a little over $400,000 was put in a trust fund ...
Way to peace?(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 22, 2008 ... Khalid Amayreh, an American-educated journalist from the West Bank, says that the Palestinian group Hamas is not opposed to Jews and Judaism; it is opposed to the creation of the state of Israel as a way to pay for the sins of Europeans (in the Holocaust) at the expense of Palestinians ....
Supporting Darwin.(CENTURY marks)(finance of exhibition featuring Charles Darwin's work)(Brief article)
Apr 22, 2008 ... The United Church Observer, a Canadian church magazine, has become the first North American sponsor of a traveling exhibit on the life and work of Charles Darwin. The exhibit, which opened last month at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, had failed to find support from such exhibits' ...
Get moving.(CENTURY marks)(Brief article)
Apr 22, 2008 ... Americans could cut carbon emissions by 64 million tons if they'd either walk or bicycle for 30 minutes a day instead of driving. They'd also collectively shed 3 billion pounds of excess fat in the process. Even more would be done for the environment if people gave up eating meat, since ...
Americans on sin.(CENTURY marks)
Apr 22, 2008 ... <Pre> Americans on sin Eighty-seven percent of Americans believe in the concept of sin. What counts as sinful behavior? Here's the percentage of Americans who view certain activities as sinful: 81% ...
The rest of the story: ministry at Trinity UCC.(Trinity United Church of Christ's Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. )
Apr 22, 2008; ... JEREMIAH WRIGHT needs no defense from me. Anyone who has built a congregation from 87 members to some 8,000 and whose congregation has created models of ministry in one of the poorest areas of Chicago has a body of work that speaks for itself. A recent press release from Trinity United ...
Grace.(Poem)
Apr 22, 2008; ... <Pre> Grace We say grace before we startto eat good things together, as ifour thin voices could somehowdivine it. We call it table grace,as if it were the elegance of furniture.We say a woman has it in the wayshe moves. We equate it with luck...
After so much darkness.(Poem)
Apr 22, 2008; ... <Pre> After so much darkness --for my father After so much darkness, the field's excess of light,the day floating on itself as in a dream.But it isn't a dream, the small wound songs of the house finch,the sun hammering the grasses' bronze tips.We had gathered ...
Obama caught between pulpit and politics.(CENTURY news)(Barack Obama)
Apr 22, 2008; ... When Senator Barack Obama faced the cameras in a nationally televised speech in mid-March, he was caught between his roles as politician and parishioner, forced to condemn his pastor's words as he tried to advance his own campaign for president. Experts on the black church say ...