In a few weeks, many of us will make our way to a place we call home in observance of Thanksgiving, our most religiously secular and secularly religious holiday. Gathered around a table of plenty, we will partake and share, acknowledging God’s gracious bounty to all and giving thanks for it.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words at Glenville High School in Cleveland on April 26, 1967. Several things have happened that have had me mulling on this concept of “somebodiness” and how, 50 years later, MLK’s words here are still so strikingly relevant.
Loan Nguyen waited anxiously at the airport for the arrival of a Syrian family that had traveled 13 hours from Jordan. The family, displaced by war in Syria, had spent more than two years in a refugee camp, trying to find a new home. The couple and their two small children were entering a country they did not know, and they had no idea what to expect.
I can still remember my first encounter with an overt racist. I must have been 8 or 9, and my friend and I were in the back seat. Her mom was driving and started talking to me.
The neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have helped renew attention on issues of race and ethnicity. Have Presbyterians’ attitudes and involvement in these issues changed with the times?
For many years, neither Glen Sanders nor Robert Stubenbort knew they had similar passions. But once they found out they shared a love for bicycles, something special happened. Sanders and Stubenbort, members of Calvin Presbyterian Church in the western Pennsylvania town of Zelienople, are the backbone of a new Bikes Mission that culminated with close to 130 refurbished bicycles and tricycles being personally delivered to a Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota in late June.
Many of us have heard that the United States’ form of government was influenced by the practices and beliefs of Presbyterians who crossed the ocean to find religious freedom. Even today, our local municipal meetings and sessions of Congress mirror what takes place in church meeting rooms around the country as elected ruling elders seek to lead each congregation. While we may understand how the church influenced the form of government, we may not always know how traditional Reformed theology has influenced the beliefs that are the bedrock of the Constitution.
In late October 1517, an obscure Augustinian monk teaching in a minor German university offered a set of propositions, inviting an academic debate. Many Presbyterians can picture Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, but we are hard-pressed to say what the theses were about, and why they sparked a movement that both reformed and divided the church.
Dear mother wearing the hijab in the children’s museum: As-salamu alaykum. Peace be upon you. When I have traveled to distant lands, hearing just one word in my cradle language has felt like having a familiar coat wrapped around me. So I speak peace to you.
Joanna Shelton spent many years believing there was no God. However, reading her great-grandfather’s journal of his time as a missionary in Japan changed that. She says that she is his latest convert.
