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Voices

Some Room for Further Exploration

It is not surprising that my first reaction on reading "A Future for Our Seminaries" was to say, "Of course, that’s right; our seminaries are doing a good job." The intensive work that C. Ellis Nelson, Bob Lynn and I did (along with Larry Jones, the "outsider" who was dean of Howard University Divinity School) as consultants for part of the major study mentioned by Nelson, opened up avenues of thought that could extend over a lifetime. Here I choose only to quarrel a bit with one of his recommendations, and then to mention five areas which we need to explore further.

Voices

A Promising Point of Departure

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson wrote several years ago, "Men and women confronting change are never fully prepared for the demands of the moment." But "they are strengthened to meet uncertainty if they can claim a history of improvisation and a habit of reflection."

Voices

A Future for our Seminaries

Presidents of Presbyterian seminaries are often asked, "How is the seminary getting along?" The answer most presidents give includes two observations. The..

Voices

Is the Church’s Call for Younger Seminarians Realisitic?

Yes — if demographers’ forecasts of significantly increasing enrollment at all levels of the education system over the next decade are accurate.

According to the Condition of Education 2001 report by the Education Department’s National Center of Education Statistics, full-time, four-year undergraduate enrollments will grow faster than part-time and two-year college enrollments during the next decade. The report also forecasts college enrollment of women will continue to outpace that of men during the next 10 years.

Uncategorized

Issues run the gamut as international listening teams visit the PC(USA)

The idea seemed pretty straightforward: take 10 "listening" teams, each with one Muslim and one Christian from another country, and send them around the United States for about two weeks, talking with as many Presbyterians along the way as they could jam into the schedule. Hope that what comes out is a better understanding of relations between Muslims and Christians, and perhaps a desire by Presbyterians in the pews to know more about the Islamic world.

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GAC will review role of Presbyterian News Service

The General Assembly Council will be asked at its Sept. 25-29 meeting in Louisville to review the role of the Presbyterian News Service, and to consider how the denomination’s news service should approach the reporting of controversial stories.

The discussion has been provoked, in part, because there are differing opinions about what the news service should do — how much editorial freedom it should have, or how much it should reflect official church policy — and how well it’s been doing its job.

Book Reviews

Pursuing Peace

By Albert N. Wells
Rainbow. 2002. 264 pp. Pb. $14.95.ISBN 1-56825-082-7

— reviewed by Albert C. Winn, Winston-Salem, N.C.

The year 2002 does not appear to be a good time for publishing a book on the pursuit of peace. But Al Wells has done it, despite the widespread approval of national policies of war and retaliation which has followed the horrendous breach of peace on Sept. 11, 2001. On the cover of this book, the subtitle "It’s the Thing to Do" is altered by an insertion that makes it read, "It’s still the Thing to Do."

Editorials

Who is Our Neighbor?

As suggested in this column last week, we have an obligation to reach out to those Christian brothers and sisters in our own fold who for whatever reason have become distant or estranged — either by our action, or theirs, or by both — before we go to the Table of our Lord.

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Philadelphia Presbytery NCDs offer a glimpse of the PC(USA)’s future

When some folks think Presbyterian, they think "frozen chosen," a collection of mostly well-to-do, well-buttoned-up, well-intentioned white people. But the General Assembly’s recent decision to go ahead with the Mission Initiative — a five-year campaign to raise $40 million from big donors for international mission work and new church development in the United States — is a sign that the vision can extend well beyond that, and that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) can, if it’s willing, nurture a more diverse, more creative, more open-ended definition of the church of the future.

Editorials

Going to the Altar

The claim has recently been made in this space that God has given the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) a moment of grace, following years of intense warfare, in which we have an opportunity to rethink who we are called to be and what God is calling us Presbyterians to do in the new century — to rekindle our commitment to Jesus Christ and to reinvigorate our mission to the world for which he died.

Outlook Features

Post-9/11 spiritual revival may be lagging, but people are reviewing their priorities

It’s been a distressing, violent year since hijacked planes plunged into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The months since then have brought a whole crop of pain around the world — suicide bombings in the Middle East, retaliation in Palestinian villages, war in Afghanistan, Hindus and Muslims attacking one another in India, a Russian plane filled with children falling from the sky, to name just a few. And, in the United States, economic news so bad that almost everyone knows someone who’s lost a job.

Book Reviews

Ichabod Toward Home: The Journey of God’s Glory

By Walter Brueggemann
Eerdmans. 2002. 150 pp. Pb. $15.ISBN 0-8028-3930-4

— reviewed by James K. Mead, Orange City, Iowa

Every preacher and teacher — and everyone who listens to sermons and lessons — cares about the theme Walter Brueggemann addresses in Ichabod Toward Home, based on his 2001 Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary. Using the Ark Narrative in 1 Samuel 4-6 to explore what the church does when it stands before a biblical text, Brueggemann contends that the story of the ark’s capture, exile and return offers an alternative vision of the church’s proclamation and life in the world.

Voices

Keep Hoping and Pray

The tragedies occurring in Pakistan have devastated Christians around the world. Pakistani Christians are at risk in our hospitals, our schools and..

Voices

A Big Yearning for a Little Heresy

I have always had a strong desire to be tried for heresy.  Heretics are exciting people while orthodoxy such as mine is completely unremarkable and rather dull.  I am not so daring as to want to be convicted of heresy but to be charged with heresy would be a great delight.  I assume that every physician longs to get sick so he can diagnose himself. 

Editorials

September

September is here: the beginning of a new school year for many (both religious and secular); the celebration of Labor Day, honoring laborers of every kind and their labor; and, for the first time, the remembering of the awful events that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, a day of infamy which the people of this nation will long remember.

Book Reviews

Pastoral Theology in the Classical Tradition

By Andrew Purves.
WJKP. 2001. 160 pp. Pb. $16.95.ISBN 0-664-22241-2

— reviewed by Richard Ray, Bristol, Va.

Turning this little book by Andrew Purves over, weighing it from hand to hand, I realized that I could not easily write an impersonal response to it. I knew its author too well. During the past few years in which we were colleagues at Pittsburgh Seminary we often discussed its basic themes.

Voices

No Empty Return

More than 60 years ago, in an era of enormous instability and hardship, my father often journeyed into remote regions of North..

Uncategorized

Task Force solicits opinions from focus groups

CHICACO — Trying to find out what's in the hearts of people out in the church, the Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) held a series of focus groups at the General Assembly this summer — asking people to speak to speak out about the task force's work and their own concerns.

Book Reviews

The Christian Life: A Geography of God

By Michael L. Lindvall.
Geneva. 2001. 135 pp. Pb. $11.95. ISBN 0-664-50142-7

— reviewed by Bill Klein, Lexington, Va.

Anyone familiar with Michael Lindvall’s book, The Good News from North Haven (reprint expected Summer 2002), will welcome his most recent effort. The Christian Life is another in the expected 12-volume Foundations of Christian Faith series being commissioned by the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and published by Geneva Press.

Editorials

A Moment of Grace

God has given the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) a moment of grace to dream new dreams, to see new visions, to lay aside the weapons of warfare, and to rethink mission and strategy on a truly grand scale.

At the end of a quarter century of nearly continuous contentiousness, it is as if a boil has been lanced, followed by an experience of relief, a weary contingent of God’s people wanting to move beyond the trenches that divided and to move forward into a future of obedience and service.

Uncategorized

Edler Garnet Hawkins (1908-1977) First African-American Moderator

The United Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), formed by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the United Presbyterian Church of North America in 1957, elected Edler Garnet Hawkins the first black moderator (1964) ever to so serve these denominations. Of course from the days of Samuel Cornish and Henry Highland Garnet to the organization of the Afro-American Presbyterian Council in Philadelphia (1894), through the years of "Jim Crow" institutionalized as "separate but equal" by the Supreme Court in 1897, Presbyterian blacks made their voices heard about Christian faith and life, breaking down some, not many, walls of segregation in the church.

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