How does a denomination resolve sharp differences of opinion? Can the denomination be a big tent where different views are tolerated? Some members insist that the RCA clearly articulate its beliefs about homosexuality, and make sure that all ministers act accordingly. Others insist that RCA members do not agree on this topic and that it is not the role of the denomination to make such statements. Should a denominational statement decide moral questions and church polity?
Eschatology has traditionally been a doctrine of Christian hope. Somewhere along the way, fire and fear edged out new creation and hope as the basic principles of Christians’ understanding of the end-times.
What I wanted to think about in that moment was this: my mother and I had somehow survived a pandemic and our lives seemed to be getting started again.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under a White Sky” finds both violence and beauty in our responses to climate change. But the moral dilemmas will only grow.
Working with Bible Pride on that sunny spring day, it hit me that scripture itself had been one of those weapons. For thousands, nay millions, of Christian LGBTQ+ people over the years, the very words that are intended to train, encourage, and enliven have been used to shame, abuse, and ultimately even kill.
Right-to-lifers understood the arguments and goals of the women’s movement and were willing to engage with feminists to a certain extent . . . Unfortunately, a growing conservative contingent in the antiabortion movement viewed the women’s movement as an existential threat to their larger goals and actively sabotaged and undermined attempts by right-to-lifers to work with feminist groups.
I’ve only been hunting once. It was, on the whole, a memorable experience for all of the right reasons: a handful of days in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a few cherished family members, chief among them my grandfather, who was nearing the end of his hunting days; eating lots of junk food; sharing stories in the evenings; ripping through forest paths on my uncle’s four-wheel ATVs (“quads”); being “forced” to wear bunny ears at the restaurant for opening day’s dinner…
Anyone who has waited and prayed for dawn knows . . . the moments in which we wait and pray for light are hard fought, painful, anxiety-inducing. It is difficult to push forward, to hold on, to hold out hope.
What hope do we have? If each of us sees and interprets the world through our social location, does that mean we will never understand each other?
The last weeks of the Trump administration were hard on the reputation of Abraham Kuyper. Jim Bratt, Kuyper’s biographer, considers how Kuyper is being appropriated and concludes that in the Reformed tradition, Abraham Kuyper is too valuable to surrender.
