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Shane Claiborne is the de facto leader of the "New Monasticism," a movement predominantly among young adults who have forsaken the trappings of middle-class comfort to move into poverty-stricken urban communities. There they seek to incarnate the Kingdom of God through work with the widow, the orphan, the alien, and the poor. Claiborne is a founding member of The Simple Way, a redemptive community located in inner-city Philadelphia. His co-author Chris Haw, a Villanova University graduate student in theology, is…

A new year has dawned. Advent and Christmas services are over, presents have been opened, the tree is at least mostly put away, and we stand at the edge of another unknown. Will this year be as blessed as last year? Dear God, will it be better? Only God knows. But God more than knows, God is here with us, and somehow that's enough. On a recent trip to visit family over the holidays I had the opportunity to worship…

As I help uncover the communion elements, I see a flash of red out of the corner of my eye. I am new to serving communion, still I have never done so with someone under indictment. I was very happy Matt had taken the deliberate effort the last couple of communion Sundays to line up servers. Too often in our little church, communion is served by those grabbed by the nape of the neck on the way forward. We are…

Who would have expected that a lesson in promoting public morality would come to us from Russia, the heart of what the great communicator, Ronald Reagan, called the "Evil Empire"? Who would have guessed the point man for protecting imprudent citizens from exploitation would be Vladimir Putin? Here is the story in brief. In 2006, Putin proposed to end legalized gambling in Russia. With the demise of the USSR in 1991, enterprises good and bad sprang up all over the…

Over the past two years I have struggled a great deal whether to support the adoption of the Belhar Confession or not. Part of me wants to support it. Like everyone else in the Reformed Church in America--or almost everyone else for that matter--I think apartheid was evil, racism is wrong, and church unity is good. I like the idea of adopting a confession that comes from the global South and may speak to non-whites in a way that our…