Red Letter Christians

I read a book this week as an assignment for my MDiv program that was very encouraging to me. If you’ve been following my blog, you may know that I grew up under the title of Protestant but have been attending Evangelical churches of different types since leaving home for college. This past decade, I have been devastated by the aligning of the white Evangelical church with ri...

As the years rolled on, I would retain the lessons harvested from my grandparents’ garden as I changed schools and careers, eventually settling in seminary, where I experienced a profound spiritual awakening that challenged everything I thought I knew about God. At the risk of contradicting myself, I must admit that the religious answers I had for life’s most pressing questio...

In October 2023, I found myself in a bomb shelter in Jerusalem with Israeli, Palestinian, and US American friends and partners. Just moments earlier, we’d been talking about righteous disagreement: the kind that doesn’t require us to abandon our convictions or diminish those with whom we disagree, but invites us to move through our differences toward a fuller understanding.

by James McKenzie Years ago, as a television reporter, I covered an immigration raid at a ConAgra chicken processing plant in Dalton, Georgia. I watched some of the INS agents high-five each other and laugh as they tossed around ethnic slurs. Later, at Mass, I spotted one of those same agents, sitting with his wife and kids. He was praying like he meant every word. The homily...

Most of us have a deep-rooted instinct for the middle ground. When two sides are shouting at each other, we assume the truth probably lies somewhere in between, and it often does. In a marriage, on a church board, or in a city council budget fight, the person who finds common ground is usually the wisest in the room. Compromise is one of the ordinary graces that keeps a socie...