Category: Perspective

Improvisations in the Key of Life

Inspired by Raymond Carr’s extended metaphor of musicality and theological language, I would say that the authors here are searching for a new key, calling us to a “radical dynamism” as they model the kinds of improvisation needed to meet the stark realities of our time. By Wendy McDowell

How Do We Think and Act Anew?

This is the other main theme running through the issue: the need to “treat our materials seriously” and use our creative powers to imagine—indeed, to build—what is not yet, as Lipscomb puts it, “to create a world we have not seen.” By Wendy McDowell

Connection

How might grieving, as a form of love and remembering, shape our responses to a changing planet? Terry Tempest Williams with Victoria Chang

Trauma, Friendship, and Awakened Possibilities

This issue is not for the faint of heart, and yet I find the pieces here to be uplifting because they provide us with models and methods for endurance, reparation, and the awakening of new possibilities. By Wendy McDowell

Slow Transformations, Small Windows of Light

The authors here challenge us to think more carefully about what responsible and responsive care looks like, and one clear through line in this issue is that “right mind” and “right relationship” go hand in hand; you cannot have one without the other. By Wendy McDowell

Blessed Are the Caregivers

The authors in this issue are chaplains, faith leaders, and professors. In these roles, they lament inequities, cry out for change, and demonstrate how to “treat the people’s needs as holy.” By Wendy McDowell

Paradise Waiting: The Power to Comfort

All kinds of power are explored here—personal, spiritual, political, and institutional power—and though they address disparate contexts, the pieces speak to one another in poignant ways. By Wendy McDowell

Filling in the Contours of ‘Unbelievers’

The authors in this issue do not lament or apologize for these shifts; they dive deeper into why they are happening, where the unaffiliated are gathering, and how they are making meaning. By Wendy McDowell

Flipping the Script

In this issue are models of courageous practices, scholarship, and creative work grounded in communities already practiced in the art of script-flipping. By Wendy McDowell

Embodied Practices, (Re)lived History

Yom Kippur is one example among many in Judaism, demonstrating the way in which the past becomes an ever-present history–a history that is relived, reenacted, every day, through every prayer, in every holiday. By Rachel Slutsky

Multiple Lenses, Essential Gestures

It strikes me that most of the articles in this issue involve putting on new lenses so that we might make different gestures. By Wendy McDowell

Bearing Witness

This moment in history makes a claim on us all. By Stephanie Paulsell

Rethinking the Sacred

For the authors in this issue, experiences of film, literature, and sound are often inseparable from religious experience. By Ingrid Norton

Nurturing Necessary Conversations

Interwoven themes of voice and expression, close relationship, conversation, and community run through this issue. By Julie Barker Gillette

Making Room

A thread running through a majority of the essays in this issue has to do with hospitality to the “stranger” and its opposite—hostility, fortification, and exclusion. Who do we let in, and who do we try to keep out? By Wendy McDowell

An Encounter with a Painting

My dialogue with An Encounter at a Well over the course of a couple of years ended up challenging, loosening, and undoing assumptions I didn’t realize I held. By Wendy McDowell

The Masks We Wear

In this issue, there is not a sense of “landing” on certainties, but more a feeling of “dreaming” (in all its connotations). By Wendy McDowell

The Poetry of Pragmatism

The authors address issues, events, and groups about which we often find ourselves unable to dialogue—because acts of violence or deprivation can render us speechless, slip us into denial, or drive us into opposing camps. By Wendy McDowell

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