Jeff Appel

Commercial Participation: Modern Sports Fandom and Sacramental Ontology

I have been wrestling with the nature of fandom, mulling over my attachment to one of the NFL’s most beloved and most successful franchises, the Super Bowl 50 Champion Denver Broncos. I grew up as an active and athletic child in sunny Denver, Colorado, during the 1980s and 1990s. And when it comes to sports […]

sacramental ontology
Gabriel J. Catanus

Bonhoeffer in the Boondocks

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was only twenty-one when he wrote Sanctorum Communio, a text hailed by Karl Barth as a theological miracle. And yet, perhaps because it was translated and printed much later than his other work, most students of Bonhoeffer miss out on this foundational work of ecclesiology. To simplify the miraculous: traditional ecclesiologies begin with […]

David Berka

Disability, Vulnerability, and the Problem of Providence

I have a friend—I will him call John—who has lived with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) for many years. A man in his early seventies, John moves and communicates very slowly but laughs easily and loudly. He loves making artwork and walking outdoors. John also suffers from a form of mental illness called intermittent explosive […]

Marina Hofman

Retelling Hagar’s Story: Reading Trauma in Genesis 16

My husband and I were in a head-on vehicle collision north of Toronto on Highway 69 at a combined speed of about 125 miles per hour. We survived what was a fatal crash for the driver who hit us, but I was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, suffered a brain injury, experienced significant physical injuries, […]

Justin Ashworth

Healing the Open Wound: Imagining Christian Border Ethics with Gloria Anzaldúa

Border encounters occur every day in our global and globalizing cities.[1] We consume food touched by people born outside the United States; we purchase things from non-citizens, brush shoulders with them as we go to work. Some of us kiss immigrants goodbye as we head out the door for the day, while others of us […]

Brian Bantum

The Third Day

A young girl tries to escape a grief-stricken home only to find that home is where her she is known most fully.

grief