Telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan from the perspective of the man who’d been beaten and left for dead, the Rev. Cedric Portis Sr. preached a rousing and thought-provoking sermon during opening worship Wednesday for the Annual Event of the Association of Partners in Christian Education, meeting in St. Louis and online through Saturday.
When a crowd was gathered on the hill to hear Jesus preach and the crowd was hungry, the disciples wanted to send them away. Instead, Jesus instructs them in Mark’s gospel, “you give them something to eat.”
“Trouble the Water,” a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) docuseries that encourages constructive conversations about race and racism, has been selected for wider distribution and is being knitted together into a full-length feature film that will be available for home viewing early this year.
The annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics in Chicago, Jan. 4-8, showed a great generational transition in the professors who teach religious ethics in seminaries, divinity schools, colleges and universities. The SCE is an ecumenical professional association of almost 1,000 members, including as many as 90 Presbyterians in recent years.
Last week as part of the lead-up to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presbyterian Peace Fellowship offered an informative webinar featuring author and scholar Dr. Michael Long, who most recently edited “Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics” about the man most responsible for organizing the landmark March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
On Tuesday, Columbia University’s Dr. Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. , one of the nation’s foremost commentators on religion and the political economy, warned an online crowd the nation is “at such a dangerous point” that “if we don’t push back against those who weaponize the Bible very soon, they might just get the upper hand, and we and our descendants will suffer.”
Jamie Bruesehoff, the most recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” recalled the first day her transgender daughter, Rebekah, came to church as herself. The one person whom Bruesehoff feared might cause problems for her and her husband, the pastor of the church, made a beeline for the pastor following worship.
More than 400 participants logged in to watch the first in a scheduled series of webinars devoted to the ongoing crisis in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Rabbi Alissa Wise, the lead organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, and the Rev. Fursan Zu’mot from the Arabic-speaking Congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan & the Holy Land (ELCJHL), led participants through an hour-long discussion that touched on humanitarian issues, differences between Christian Zionism and antisemitism, and the school of hatred seemingly being perpetuated from the ongoing conflict.
Raquel Willis, a transgender woman who wrote “The Risk it Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation,” quoted for a crowd gathered online and in person for the Westminster Town Hall Forum last week this snippet from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”: “I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.”
David French, a decorated military veteran and former litigator who’s now a New York Times columnist and, last week, the McClendon Scholar at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., borrows from the prophet Micah for his three commandments for Christians in politics.