Lament, Despair, and Hope
By Rick Barry
Many evangelical Christians confuse lamentation for despair. This confusion can cut us off from one of the most powerful tools in our spiritual arsenal.
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By Rick Barry
Many evangelical Christians confuse lamentation for despair. This confusion can cut us off from one of the most powerful tools in our spiritual arsenal.
By Alli Bobzien
In our home we study the traditionally popular women in scripture like Esther, Ruth, and Mary. But we have added the beautiful stories of Hagar: the first female theologian who names God, Miriam and Deborah: leaders of their people, and the sisters Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Noah, and Milcah: who advocated for more just laws due to their unwavering faith.
By Rick Barry
Ultimately, the culture war paradigm is not just destructive to Christians or to the church—it is also destructive to the country.
By Kristyn Komarnicki
When we make space to lean towards each other with attention, to listen and to hear, not just the words we speak to each other but the actual hopes and hurts and fears and joys, we are offering each other the most sacred gift available to us.
By Lē Weaver
The Chicago Declaration was intended to serve as a framework for concrete evangelical engagement with the pressing social issues of the day. Christian Feminism Today (known originally as the Evangelical Women’s Caucus) came into being as a direct result of that Thanksgiving workshop, and with it a movement known as biblical feminism was born.
By Heidi Weaver-Smith
If liberation is so central to the message Jesus came to accomplish and proclaim, it must also be to those of us who profess his name and take part in his resurrected body. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection point us towards the liberative future of shalom he has accomplished for us, the already-but-not-yet Kingdom of God which breaks into our world daily, yet has not finalized its work.
By Lē Weaver
This Women’s History Month, we remember the women who helped shape the Chicago Declaration of Evangelicals for Social Action, CSA’s founding document. The Chicago Declaration, signed by 53 evangelical leaders in 1973, was written as a call for Christians to engage in issues of justice and to reject racism, economic injustice, violence, and sexism. While the group that signed the document were diverse theologically, they lacked the racial and gender diversity we strive for today.
By Kristan Pitts
May peace never come until justice is actualized. Expose to everyone injustice that is both overt and covert. Then make it so that inequity may never be hidden again.
By Liz Cooledge Jenkins
Even in the warmest and most welcoming evangelical churches, patriarchy looms as an ever-present force, suppressing women’s possibilities and debilitating whole communities. Well-intentioned churchgoers and church leaders have bought into deeply-entrenched male-dominated mindsets, power structures, and theologies that are not working—not for women, and really not for anyone.
By Inés Velásquez-McBryde
Racism has joined with sexism to dismember women of color at a cost to our heads, hearts, bodies, and souls. It has also dismembered women from women and women from men. We must repent, restore, and re-member back the places long devastated and rebuild the broken bride of Christ.
By Cole Arthur Riley
It takes real commitment, real awareness to commit yourself to pause and to know that the thing you are grieving is worth sadness.
By Heidi Weaver-Smith
Dr. Dolores E. Lee McCabe is a trailblazing figure whose life and ministry have left an indelible mark on the landscape of gender equality, have advanced the church’s prophetic witness against gun violence, and has resulted in many people converting and turning to Christ. Born in 1944, she has dedicated over four decades to ministry. Her journey is not just one of personal milestones, but a testament to her unwavering commitment to mentoring and equipping women in ministry, passionately advocating for gender equity in the church, evangelizing with unique power, and advocating against gun violence.
By Michael Stalcup
I wish I didn’t know who George Floyd was,
had never heard his name or seen his face
displayed on screens or blazoned on brick walls,
unbreathing monuments to life erased.
By Lauren Grubaugh Thomas
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was a pastor and civil rights leader whose conviction and courage consistently led him to the frontlines of the struggle for justice. As someone who pushed his peers to greater risk-taking, Shuttlesworth’s leadership was crucial in elevating the cause for racial justice to the national conversation.
By Sarah String
Ella Josephine Baker was born in 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. Growing up in the segregated South, she witnessed firsthand the injustices faced by African Americans. Her grandmother, who was formerly enslaved, instilled in her a strong sense of pride and resilience. The Great Depression also imprinted values like what it means to live in and through suffering.
By Heidi Weaver-Smith
Lent is about taking time to lose the things we can’t take with us as we remember what we cannot afford to lose. Lent frees us to remember our frailty and finitude, our reliance upon all the things that have taken God’s place as our home, and our need for God’s grace to find our way towards a future free from sorrow.
Howard Thurman, born on November 18, 1899, in Daytona Beach, Florida, stands as a towering figure in American history, leaving an indelible mark as an author, philosopher, theologian, and civil rights leader.
CSA is a group of Christian scholar-activists, stirring the imagination for a fuller expression of Christian faithfulness and a more just society.
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