Born in Memphis and a Roman Catholic priest for the Diocese of Memphis for 44 years, Msgr. Val Handwerker is presently pastor of St. Patrick Catholic Church, located in the southern end of downtown. He is committed to urban ministry, and St. Patrick’s offers that vision, building upon its more than 150-year legacy at the same location. His preaching
While in medical school, the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Robinson felt unequivocally called by the Lord to a bi-vocational synthesis of medicine and ministry: healing individuals, families and communities while joining God’s work to holistically “heal the land.” He is a systems-directed change agent: transforming urban churches into multi-faceted social, economic, and community development engines; delivering a more diversified physician
In In the Midst of the City: The Gospel and God’s Politics, the Very Rev. Barkley Thompson argues that Christian faith and politics are inseparable. Politics is, in Thompson’s words, “commentary and action that affect the polis…and the citizens for whom the polis is home.” To embody God’s politics we must first steep ourselves in God’s vision embodied in
Rabbi Micah Greenstein loves Torah no matter where it comes from. “Torah” in a broad Jewish sense refers to the teachings and wisdom of Judaism, but he treasures insights on goodness, love, justice, shalom, and compassion from every faith tradition and every reflection of God’s unity. What inspires him most about the Jewish legacy he lives and teaches is
Rabbi Micah Greenstein loves Torah no matter where it comes from. “Torah” in a broad Jewish sense refers to the teachings and wisdom of Judaism, but he treasures insights on goodness, love, justice, shalom, and compassion from every faith tradition and every reflection of God’s unity. What inspires him most about the Jewish legacy he lives and teaches is
God’s healing often comes even and especially in the midst of the imperfection and messiness of our lives. It does not always come on our terms or in ways that we expect.
When we seriously read the Bible, we begin to see that our realities are just old systems, cranking out the same rivalries, competitions, winner/loser, insider/outsider narratives century after century.
“Elijah’s stellar prophetic performance is interrupted. It’s interrupted by the sound of silence and the notion that God may be all the more present when the activity stops, and we’re not so sure we can go on, than when we’re calling down fire and apparently at the top of our spiritual game.”
“Whatever work the Camino de Santiago de Compostela does on one’s soul, whatever wisdom it has to impart happens one step at a time. It comes in through each encounter of the bottom of one’s boot with the earth, and through encounters with other walkers along The Way.”
After the experience of the Pentecost, the disciples went out into the world— not swept upward to heaven, as they perhaps had hoped to be, but outward into the world. They set out on dusty roads to encounter and love the downcast, the poor, and the oppressed; to bring reconciliation and peace to the arrogant and the hard of