in All things

Early in my teaching career, a mentor told me that he thought being a professor was much harder now than when he started, because he now spent several hours “doing email” each day. 

Many of us remember the 90s and what has become known as “purity culture.”  It was a time of promoting abstinence, purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls.

I have learned that navigating doubt is always a matter of discernment. We must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to shut down the conversation with premature pronouncements. We must learn to walk together with patience, love, and hope, trusting that there is something deeper than doubt.

God’s love, he says, is seen here, in this suffering of Christ, in this bleeding wound, a suffering which remains in the midst of violence but is not consumed by it. With this contradiction, Phil Klay opens his premiere novel Missionaries, a work about the ways in which war is exported and propagated, and ultimately transfigures the world.