by | Nov 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
Sixty years later, their sermons calling for change and greater civility still resonate.
Less than a year before the US presidential election, pastors took to their pulpits to decry a culture of hate, extremism, and vile politics.
“Much of the hate and discord that has been poisoning our nation has been preached in the name of Christ and the church,” Charles V. Denman declared.
In a different sanctuary, William Dickinson proclaimed, “Hate knows no political loyalty and is as deadly and as vicious in the heart and mind of liberals and those to the far right as to the far left alike.”
Those sermons were delivered not during the current race for the White House—but in the aftermath of the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
To mark the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, a leading scholar on faith and politics sees lessons in the decades-old messages for Americans today.
“One overarching theme emerges again and again: a call for civility, a call for condemnation of extremism and a call to end the divisions and polarizations … that they think provided the climate in which this assassination could occur,” said Matthew Wilson, director of Southern Methodist University’s Center for Faith and Learning. “That is really striking because so much of what they say seems to apply to our current moment.”
Library archives at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology include sermons preached to overflowing crowds on November 24, 1964—the Sunday after the shooting.
The transcripts, mostly from Methodist churches, are in the papers of the late William C. Martin, a Methodist bishop and president of the National Council of Churches.
“He reached out to Dallas clergy … asking for copies of the sermons preached after the assassination,” …
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by | Nov 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
A conversation with artist Kieran Dodds and academic Christian Gonzalez Ho on their new exhibit, ancient pilgrimage sites, and the church of the future.
This interview is a special collaboration with Ekstasis, CT’s imaginative NextGen project, and originally appeared in the Ecstatic Newsletter, an extension of Ekstasis on Substack. Together, we’re building a digital cathedral that offers space to ponder and lift our eyes to Christ in wonder.
As you scroll through this story, you are embarking on a form of pilgrimage.
We tap incessantly at our phones for the same reason our forebears traveled repeatedly to the Holy Land, says art historian Christian Gonzalez Ho: to commune with something greater than ourselves, to express a “longing to go to another place, or to have another place reach [us].”
Gonzalez Ho and photographer Kieran Dodds are the creators of a new exhibit, “Heading Home: Glimpses of New Jerusalem.” The show is curated by John Silvis and is running this fall and winter at the Ahmanson Gallery in Irvine, California. Featuring Dodds’s photographs of pilgrimage sites on the route between London and Jerusalem, placed in an interactive gallery space designed by Gonzalez Ho, “Heading Home” asks us to revisit the ancient practice of pilgrimage and consider its relationship with contemporary Christianity.
Images of stops along the pilgrimage route—the Florence Duomo, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—are paired with sound installations and physical structures that reinterpret the experience of interacting with each site. Christianity Today spoke with Dodds and Gonzalez Ho about the possibilities and challenges of interpreting these sites for modern believers.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Let’s start with the origins of this exhibit. Why did you two choose to focus on this topic for this …
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by | Nov 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
The spiral-bound tomes guarding the secrets of the best sugar cookies, sheet cake, and seven-layer salad are disappearing—but not completely.
Did someone say Jell-O salad?
This is the time of year when families pull out their stained recipes to make crowd-pleasing casseroles, cakes, and cookies. Some of those favorite recipes come from church cookbooks, compiled by women over the decades since the 19th century.
These spiral-bound collections of recipes have been a staple in church culture, documenting the tastes and traditions of their communities over the years. But now, as cookbook enthusiasts age, the victual volumes are disappearing.
Tallowood Baptist Church in Houston used to print cookbooks filled with recipes for sheet cakes and soups, and members would make the dishes in a potluck to share. But it’s been eight or nine years since their last edition.
“The people who were dedicated to the project are no longer with us, and no one has thought of doing another cookbook,” said Joy Cryer, a church librarian at Tallowood.
It only takes one enthusiastic person in a church to compile recipes from members, but the internet has changed the way people cook and gather recipes. And Americans of all socioeconomic statuses generally cook less than they used to.
Though the church cookbook tradition has declined, it might be too early to declare it over. CT surveyed 22 church librarians, and more than a third said they knew of churches that were still printing cookbooks.
In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 84-year-old Mona Schultz attends Plymouth Church, a nondenominational church of about 250. She wasn’t sure if anyone cooked much anymore, or if there would be interest in doing a church cookbook. She asked a young women’s Bible study at her church what they thought of the idea.
“I’m 84, I’m out of touch,” said Schultz, who has been going …
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by | Nov 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
Christians have every reason to reduce light pollution.
It’s hard not to be sentimental about a Northern Hemisphere December, with its snow (or in the American South, where I live, its relative cool), its coziness, and of course, the Christmas decorations. Twinkling lights transform city streets into galaxies, and an ornamented Christmas tree fills my living room with the scent of pine needles.
On top of that tree rests a star. Some people cap their trees with an angel, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve gravitated toward the star, which represents one of the more enigmatic elements of the already peculiar narratives about Jesus’ birth.
Matthew’s gospel tells us that after Jesus was born, wise men from the East traveled to Bethlehem to worship him. Unlike the shepherds, who received a divine birth announcement from a company of angels, the wise men identified a single star rising in the sky as the impetus for their pilgrimage: “We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him” (2:2).
It’s a detail that raises far more questions than it answers. Theologians and astronomers alike continue to contemplate Yuletide mysteries like the star of Bethlehem, but a different question is at the forefront of my mind this Christmas season: If that same star appeared in the night sky today, would we even be able to see it?
I first began to think about stars and their place in our modern world while studying another passage of Scripture in which celestial bodies play a prominent role. In Genesis 12, God makes a covenant with a man named Abram.
God promises to make Abram into a great nation, a promise that seems improbable since Abram has no children and his wife is barren.
Years pass, and Abram’s nomadic household has yet to resemble anything …
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by | Nov 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
More than a million unused IVF embryos are in cryostorage. Are they the next pro-life frontier?
Evangelicals and other pro-life advocates saw the 2022 Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a turning point in the fight against abortion in the United States. After the court overturned Roe v. Wade and removed federal protection for the procedure, some conservative states began introducing fetal personhood laws, granting the unborn the same rights as full-born children.
But Hannah Strege watched it all unfold with another vulnerable group in mind: frozen embryos. In this new era, would they have rights? If they did, would anyone respect them?
Strege, 24, was conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1996 and frozen for two years. In 1997, she and 19 of her siblings were adopted in embryo form by John and Marlene Strege. They were shipped by FedEx to a local fertility clinic. Hannah was the only embryo to survive thawing and to successfully implant in Marlene’s uterus. She was born in December 1998.
“The baby is created in a laboratory and transferred to a uterus. The baby contains all the components of a separate life to become fully developed, at the time of fertilization. The frozen embryo lives outside his or her mother’s womb, ‘albeit with artificial aid,’” wrote the authors of an amicus brief submitted in July 2021 for the Dobbs case to highlight personhood at the earliest stages of development. “Hannah’s life is proof-positive of this fact.”
Hannah was not the first human born from a donated embryo—that is thought to have happened in 1984. But Hannah was born at the height of the debate over embryonic stem cell research in the late ’90s and early 2000s and is known as the first “snowflake …
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