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CSA’s free weekly publication, a carefully curated collection of original articles at the intersection of spiritual formation and social action.
By Matthew Tyson
Allow me to begin with a direct and simple premise: For the Christian: the death penalty is inadmissible.
By this, I mean that the death penalty stands in opposition to the transformative power of Christ, the gospel’s message of redemption, and the mission handed down to Christians by Jesus himself.
By Bret Kincaid
As you’re writing out your New Year’s resolutions, how about this one? Love your neighbor.
Perhaps you’ve already committed yourself to engage in public service this year. Still, I offer the following 10 suggestions to help us all live into the second greatest commandment—love your neighbor as yourself—in a year that will surely be full of political, economic, and other challenges.
By Jennifer Carpenter
Whether you gathered around to watch the “ball drop” or slept through the festivities, we have entered a new year with new challenges and new possibilities. Along with your list of resolutions of things to be or do in 2019, perhaps we can join together in praying this poem throughout the year.
By Elrena Evans
From the time he was a young teenager, Scott Morris felt the call to serve God through the church. “But the thought of preaching 52 sermons a year sent shivers down my spine,” Scott says.
By Charles Lattimore Howard
A sister’s brave alto solemnly washes over our heads from within the midst of our procession. The cool breeze on this hot Washington, DC day carries her words as she begins to sing louder, with a slight variation on the word “walk.”
By Melanie Springer Mock
When Paige Patterson made a “comeback sermon” last month at a church revival in Alabama, he chose to include body-shaming as a way to bring his listeners to Jesus. Patterson had been fired months earlier from his post as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
From all of us at CSA!
By Makoto Fujimura
A teenage girl claims an angel told her she’d have a virgin birth. Her fiancé is hesitant to believe her. She gives birth in a stable. The people who come to visit are not family members but shepherds—the most humble people of the time, like today’s garbage collectors.
By David Schmidt
“Pray that your flight be not in the winter…”
It was dusk when I reached the Casa del Peregrino shelter in Mexico City, and the winter chill had already set in.
By Phileena Heuertz
Years ago, my friends Jeelan and Nazreen gave me the gift of physical sight. Jeelan was born into an Urdu-speaking folk Muslim family in the heart of South India’s Tamil Nadu. Nazreen was born into a progressive Pakistani-Malay Muslim family.
By Joe Tatum
Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn’s new film Widows is equal parts character study, heist film, and political thriller. Based on the 1983 series of the same name, Widows centers on four women who become widowed after their partners die during a heist gone wrong.
By Karen González
Every year from December 16 to 24, Las Posadas begin in many Latin American countries and immigrant communities in the U.S. Roughly translated, posadas means “inn” or “shelter.” Las Posadas recalls the events in Luke’s Gospel leading up to Jesus’ birth.
By Jonathan Brooks
At Canaan we are trying to live into our tagline “the church where love makes the difference,” which we have found to be a very dangerous statement. Christians often tell people we love them before we have ever lived with, listened to, or learned from them.
By Tim Mascara
On December 4, 1959, Soviet artist Evgeny Vuchetich presented a bronze statue to the United Nations, titledLet Us Beat Our Swords into Plowshares. The sculpture is an image of a man beating a sword into a plowshare, meant to symbolize humankind’s desire to end war—the desire to take the tools of violence and war and turn them into tools for peace, tools to benefit humankind rather than harm it.
By Ethan Tan
The white Christmas Bing Crosby dreams of was never mine. I grew up in Malaysia, a Christian, a Chinese. In a Muslim-Malay majority country, I was a minority among minorities.
By Nikki Toyama-Szeto
My sister is always the best gift-giver in our family. Mention some random interest, and she’ll remember, find it, and wrap it up for you to open on Christmas morning.
By John M. Perkins
Our country claims to “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Chief among these rights is life, but these days we are asking a lot of questions about life: What are lives really worth?
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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