It was in August of 2013 that I traveled to New York City with the Faith and Politics Institute (FPI) and a group of Congressional Representatives on what was described as “Becoming America”: a pilgrimage to celebrate the immigrant story and the role immigrants played in the creation of the
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Watching the PC(USA)’s Task Force to Review and Help Reform Drug Policy in the United States Months earlier, the process had already begun. Members of a task force appointed by the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America had convened twice,
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A Season Yet to Come Summer is coming…and still we are not saved. Two scripture lessons frame what the Holy Spirit is saying to the church today: Psalm 104:27-34, 35b and John 20:19-23. First there’s Psalm 104, a psalm which is subtitled ‘A Hymn to God the Creator’. It begins
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Dog-Whistling and Sin-Talk It happened most recently on a family trip to a museum. This trip was particularly special because the museum had recently accepted my wife’s fiber art piece into one of its shows. I sat outside the gallery on a balcony that overlooked the small theater that was
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Interview with Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons As part of the finale to our discussion on race, white privilege, and the church, Rev. Molly Casteel – Assistant Stated Clerk and Manager for Representation, Inclusiveness, and Ruling Elder Training – sat down with Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Gradye Parsons
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Participation of Reformed Churches and Clergy in Demonstrations in Ferguson This essay is an excerpt from Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty’s contribution to Calvinism on the Peripheries: Religion and Civil Society in Europe, ed. by Ábrahám KOVÁCS, co-edited by Béla BARÁTH (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2009), 295 pp. The events that have unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri,
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It was a typical muggy August day in Chicago when I pulled up to McCormick Seminary in my U-Haul van, trailed by a car full of college guys – my brother and his friends, who had agreed to help me move into my new seminary housing in exchange for some
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Antiracism Conversations at the Congregational and Denominational Levels I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King. Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot
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This article originally appeared in the May 1992 issue of Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought (http://perspectivesjournal.org.) It is republished her with permission of the author and the journal. I have this vivid memory of the uncertainty I felt sitting in First Presbyterian Church of Chicago at a Presbytery meeting
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White Supremacy and the Church Last week, I once again found myself protesting in the streets of Chicago. Showing up to a demonstration organized by activists of color, I joined them chanting: “White Supremacy is the enemy. Shut it down! Shut it down!” As I pronounced every word, I felt
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