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Essays

Overcoming The Politics of Despair—Psalm 22:1-15 (Stephen Dawson)

The psalmist wrestles with despair, drawing strength from remembrances of God’s past protection and help. Politics, which must also face the threat of despair, can learn from the way that both the psalmist and Christ after him preserve the glimmer of hope against despair’s engulfing darkness.

The Theological Anthropology of ICE’s “Priority Enforcement Program,” Pt. I (Greg Williams)

On 13 August, the main floor of the New Haven People’s Center was characteristically hot and unusually crowded for a late summer evening. About half a dozen lawyers, nonprofit workers, and labor union staff were there for a meeting of the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance.

The Politics of Grace—Mark 10:2-16 (Amy Allen)

Jesus’ welcome of the little children provides us with the appropriate paradigm for understanding grace and the reception of the kingdom of God and challenges our emphasis upon rules and conditions.

A Philosophy of Christian Materialism: Entangled Fidelities and the Public Good (Christopher R. Baker, Thomas A. James and John Reader)

This book is both a project and a staging post on a shared journey. It is a place where, for a brief moment, the three of us came to rest in order to explore and expand upon our separate reflections on attempts to construct an appropriate contemporary conceptuality for Christianity, and its implications for engaged practice and public theology.

The Politics of Empowerment—Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29 (Robert Williamson)

In Numbers 11 the power of leadership that had formerly been concentrated in Moses was spread more widely among the people. This vision of the diffusion of leadership throughout the body politic is one with many challenging lessons for our current situation.