“On April 4, 1968, hours before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. phoned his office in Atlanta. It was a Thursday, and he had to let the church secretary know his sermon title for Sunday’s service: Why America May Go to Hell.” – Isaac Villegas www.christiancentury.org/features/ame...

“Why did Jesus die? This is the central question of our faith. Unless we can answer it in a way that connects the cross with us and our world, then the gospel falls apart.” – Brandon Ambrosino www.christiancentury.org/online-colum...

“Psychologists say that siblings grow up in different families. Mark and I illustrate that strange reality.” – Lynne Baab, one of the winners of our Readers Write essay contest, sponsored by the Frederick Buechner Center www.christiancentury.org/readers-writ...

“Faith compels us to resist and protest the dominating forces of our time, to stand in the breach between our present and God’s promised future.” – Kelly Brown Douglas www.christiancentury.org/voices/one-d...

“President Trump‘s lies are too obvious to accomplish much real deception; their function is to demonstrate his status beyond the reach of truth itself.” – The @christiancentury.bsky.social editors www.christiancentury.org/editors/pres...

“What kind of faith gets you through 25 years in a refugee camp?” – Laurel Mathewson #lectionary www.christiancentury.org/lectionary/a...

“Sarah Jobe—a career prison chaplain herself—opens with the claim that prison chaplaincy is death work.” – @ptugwell.bsky.social reviews No Godforsaken Place www.christiancentury.org/books/death-... @tandtclark.bsky.social

“There is precedent to read Christ’s presentation of the stigmata in John 20:24–29 as a presentation of self-­inflicted scars akin to the tattooed faces of Chin women.” – Adam Toler www.christiancentury.org/features/etc...

“Holy Week” Properly observed, it is a slow greening process, unfolding of the bud buried in every breast. … – Read Bonnie Thurston’s full poem www.christiancentury.org/poetry/holy-...

“We must see through the lie that war could ever be moral, that it could ever bring liberation or prosperity. The results of war are clearly seen in the ruins of a girls school in Iran.” – @revdrmichaelwoolf.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/online-colum...

“The question is not just what we mean by ‘progressive Christianity’ or whether we really mean it when we say it. The bigger question is this: Toward what progress, what goal, what telos are we walking as we follow the way of Jesus?” – Stephanie Perdew www.christiancentury.org/voices/why-i...

“The narrative about AI and disinformation only scratches the surface of the issue. The deeper story is about our moral perception: our capacity to see the truth for what it is.” – Brooklyne Oliveira www.christiancentury.org/features/bel...

“To be able to buy the food that people will actually eat, good food, and serve it to them—that’s radical hospitality to me. But it’s just also being a good neighbor.” – Teresa Kim Pecinovsky, in an interview by Jasmin Pittman www.christiancentury.org/interviews/s...

“Prison encounters transformed Barth’s account of atonement. Jesus does not absorb a transferable punishment for our sin; he takes the place of the condemned, the accused, and the criminal.” – @melissaf-b.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/voices/all-a...

“There’s always a Herod; there’s always a Rachel.” – Mac Loftin www.christiancentury.org/online-colum...

“There’s no postmortem dialogue, no galvanizing Great Commission. Instead, Mark offers the biblical equivalent of a poem that ends with an ellipsis or a dinner party where the host ushers the guests out the door before dessert. The effect is our untethering.” – Danielle Tumminio Hansen

“More individuals are converting to Judaism today than at any point since the Roman era—even though Jewish communities, as a whole, rarely promote or actively seek converts.” – Austin Reid Albanese www.christiancentury.org/features/all...

“There are, throughout the Hebrew Bible, 16 maps of the land that God grants to Israel. Sixteen—none of them exactly the same, and all of them much more modest than the map God gives to Abraham.” – Mordechai Beck www.christiancentury.org/features/heb...

“Hope dawns in a brutal world, especially for those who have languished in places of great shame and indignity. The hierarchies and artificial divisions so common to the Roman era wilt in the face of the resurrection.” – B. G. White www.christiancentury.org/features/mar...

“Rage farming, algorithmically curated outrage, has trained our bodies to react before we perceive. We scroll past faces. We sort humans into threats and allies before we have met them.” – C. Andrew Doyle www.christiancentury.org/features/ami...

“Meggan Watterson mines Thecla’s ancient story of conversion and ministry for insights to apply to the lives of contemporary women.” – Nicole Schrag reviews The Girl Who Baptized Herself www.christiancentury.org/books/theolo...

“With the seasons of Lent and Ramadan also upon us, I find myself turning to Abrahamic sacred history to help make sense of the moment. In this spirit, here are three lessons from Abrahamic female figures for International Women’s Month.” – Celene Ibrahim www.christiancentury.org/features/lea...

“If revival is possible . . . it confronts mainline Christians with the limits of our own understanding of secularization. We have been identified so closely with decline that it has become a weight-bearing part of our self-image.” – Benjamin Dueholm www.christiancentury.org/voices/are-w...

“I heard in Paul Thomas Anderson’s acceptance speech the same earnest hope and regard for children that I see in his work.” – @christhiessen.bsky.social on One Battle After Another www.christiancentury.org/features/pau...

“God calls us back to the present tense. Yet staying here requires an openness to living the entirety of our lives liturgically, to seeing God present and available in the bread and dishes of the everyday.” – @stephsaldana.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/voices/hope-...

“The sages see in Nimrod’s deeds the necessity of a constant check against the arrogance of power. Yet they also offer a warning to his followers: You follow a bad king at your peril.” – Mordechai Beck www.christiancentury.org/features/bad...

“Jeannine Hill Fletcher’s Grace of The Ghosts is an unflinching, multifaceted, and engrossing work. She uses the metaphor of the ghost to consider the grim history of the Catholic Church in America.” – review by Elizabeth Robeson www.christiancentury.org/books/ufw-ma... @fordhampress.bsky.social

“It would be far easier to remain aloof and simply read about our ‘neighbors’ in books and surveys or make assumptions about them based on their yard signs.” – @amarpeterman.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/features/com...

“Historical thinking enriched my theological imagination. At their best, theology and history are complementary tools that enact remembering as a sacred practice.” – Peter Choi www.christiancentury.org/voices/remem...

“Is progress—defined as the expansion of markets and technologies in a marginally liberal democracy—really the telos we find revealed in scripture?” – Stephanie Perdew www.christiancentury.org/voices/why-i...

“At the heart of Teresa Morgan’s proposal is that trust, which is revealed in Christ’s trusting of God, enables and empowers a human to turn away from wrongdoing and suffering and toward Jesus and God.” – review by @scotmcknight.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/books/rethin...

“It was refreshing to go back through the ruins of these modern Christian classics with @rbratten.bsky.social as companion and guide.” – @darkartcafe.bsky.social reviews The Books that Made Us www.christiancentury.org/books/decons...

“It is unfair to expect perfection from our leaders. But when our leaders govern from avarice, militarization, and dehumanization, they make it impossible to trust that they are operating in our best interests.” – @revdrmichaelwoolf.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/online-colum...

“I never expected to be a dad. However much I’d have liked to, being openly gay foreclosed that route, at least according to the map charted by my Assemblies of God upbringing.” – Mario Koym-Garza www.christiancentury.org/features/my-...

“You never quite know a person until you’ve come face-to-face with what they’ve left behind.” – Deadra Bachorik Ashton, a winner in our Readers Write essay contest, supported by the Frederick Buechner Center www.christiancentury.org/readers-writ...

“Showing up as a movement chaplain is about going with a few other chaplains and working as a unit around the edges of a crowd at a protest to see who needs care. It’s about having a watchful presence.” – @tkpcreates.bsky.social, in an interview by Jasmin Pittman

“These two books work as companion pieces, and I’m glad to have read them. Both @drewstrait.bsky.social and @amandatylerbjc.bsky.social root their discussions in wide-ranging research, but they add the important focus on concrete and actionable advice.” – review by @cynthiarwallace.bsky.social

“My entry to the mainline came with hiccups, awkward moments, and growing pains. In retrospect, I realize that many of my fellow congregants assumed I automatically understood their church culture. (I didn’t.)” – @michellevanloon.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/features/fou...

“I am not suggesting we give everyone carte blanche to degrade or harm one another. We can and should hold people accountable for their wounding words and actions. But accountability is not served by cancellation.” – Brandon Ambrosino www.christiancentury.org/features/ref...

“While churches vary widely, I have not given up hope that mainline congregations could serve as the community-building, justice-seeking, emotionally safe places that many exvangelical millennials are searching for.” – Liz Cooledge Jenkins www.christiancentury.org/features/rec...

“What is the role of theology in a time of war? I’m a theologian, but I don’t ask this question out of a desire for professional relevance. It’s a question of last resort, driven by an unavoidable feeling that political opposition to this war is a dead end.” – Mac Loftin

“In online spaces, the steps of muting, speaking, muting again, pausing, and hearing from another offer the possibility that silence becomes a valued member of the group.” – Stephanie Perdew www.christiancentury.org/voices/givin...

“Judaism’s shift away from universalism came not through theological evolution but through historical trauma. After a series of failed revolts and the rise of Christianity as Rome’s state religion, laws were enacted that forbade Jewish proselytism.” – Austin Reid Albanese

“Historically—even if we go back to biblical times—there are no clear borders to the land. As a consequence, the claim that the land of Israel is a fixed entity is simply not true.” – Mordechai Beck www.christiancentury.org/features/heb...

“Just as the Roman elite made efforts to systematize the erasure of an unwanted past—to create the illusion of a pure one—so the legislatures across our country are attempting to do the same.” – Jennifer Kaalund www.christiancentury.org/online-colum...

The latest in our Dear Pastors series is from Dawn Martin Hyde: “There are people outside the church who are interested in maintaining neither a church building nor an institution that you helped build. But they may be interested in Jesus: in knowing him, in hearing what he does for people.”

“Authorized violence coarsens everyone it touches. We are undergoing moral trauma—all of us, on every side. This is why the church cannot speak casually about enforcement and security, as though they were morally neutral.” – @texasbishop9.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/features/ami...

“As a trans person I am struck by how Jesus’ wilderness experience relies on inner convictions resisting an external voice.” - @revrachelmann.bsky.social www.christiancentury.org/article/jesu...

“Throughout the New Testament these warnings appear: Do not be deceived; Be vigilant; Grow up in discernment; Test what you hear. These admonitions were not about paranoia. They were about maturity.” – Jennifer Kaalund www.christiancentury.org/online-colum...

“As a biracial woman from the South who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity, I’m often attuned to a different America than the one most established scholars seem to inhabit. The scholar who mentored me was attuned to a world beyond my reach and welcome.” – Emily Hunt-Hinojosa