Lincoln Christian School: News of the Founder
Jeanne Murray Walker reminisces about her father, her school, and how she learned subversion.
Issue 32: Family
In the earliest biblical description of human beings, we are told to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28), yet two chapters later we read of the harsh reality of barrenness, a recurring theme in the Scriptures. We sometimes speak of salvation as an entrance into a new family—the church—and God’s people are thus said to be God’s children, but Christ himself spoke of the need to hate one’s father, mother, and partner in order to enter into discipleship. Christians baptize their infants and train their young into their faith, the Catholic Church calls family the “domestic church,” and the Protestant philosopher G. W. F. Hegel argued that the family is the base unit of society, but through these very units, Christianity has helped to produce and maintain patriarchy, with the notion of family often functioning as a sort of Christianized fetish. The boundaries, values, and status of the modern nuclear family and the role of faith in family formation are continually up for debate as we ponder, what, in fact, constitutes a family.
In this issue of The Other Journal, we take up some of the most pressing, family-related questions of our time: What is the nature of family? What are the ways the Christian theological tradition has understood or misunderstood family? What is the family of God, and who do we erroneously leave out or mischaracterize when we think of faith in this way? What role has our understanding of the modern family played in shaping and determining our understanding of the family of God? What are the ways in which Christian thought and practices maintain traditional family logics? Or how do Christianity’s varied conceptions about family name antifamily practices and influence our present moment?
In this issue’s essays, creative writing, art, and reviews, our contributors tackle this theme eclectically as they explore everything from familial responsibility and the formation of alternative family structures to the interrogation of patriarchy’s place in the theological tradition. We hope it proves to be a timely and helpful resource.
Fortunate Fall
Dennis Vannatta tells a story about confronting one’s past—and then one’s future.
Love Bombing
Rachel Sturges looks into the lives of a fisherman’s daughters.
The Others in Our Midst: Jesus, the Good Samaritan, and Hirano Imao
Joshua Ryo Nelson-Hashimoto considers a modern-day good Samaritan story.
I Stood Up at Your Funeral: A Review of Katie Manning’s 28,065 Nights
Tom C. Hunley spends an evening pondering 28,065 nights by Katie Manning.
Career and Calling, For Better and Worse
Chad Eggleston and Mandy McMichael consider the challenges and unexpected blessings of marriage between academics.
And as I Cycled, I Thought about God
Symen Auke Brouwers rides his bike through the fens.
A Study in Superfluity
Veronica Toth explores utilitarianism through intellectual history and lived experience.
Shelter Out of Place
Liz Charlotte Grant discovers how hard it is to shelter in place when trying to sell a home.
Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand: A Life Reconsidered
Charles Marsh wants to free Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life from its scholarly confinements.
Unity and Diversity Walk Together: Reflections from Missiology and Family Systems Theory
Megan Anna Neff considers missional theology and family systems theory.
Jesuit Life, Family Life
Bruce Morrill employs a Jesuit narrative technique to describe tensions between life in the religious order and family life.
Hierophagy: The Sacramental Recapitulation of a Literary Trope
Christopher West examines the Eucharist as an instance of sacred eating.
Fatherly Rage
Jonathan Hiskes grapples with parental anger amid the tedium and injustice of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Made in God’s Image: Renewing the Divine Attributes in Humanity
Kathy Berry offers a rabbinic perspective on the divine attributes, the disrobing of humanity, and God’s salvific response.
Looking at Family through a Resurrection Lens
Marrissa Rhodes contemplates what Christ’s resurrection has to say about imperfect family experiences.
Family Stories: Growing in Our Narrative
Elvir Ciceklic tells a story about God’s family story.
A Vulnerable Trust: Why the Church Shouldn’t Invest in Its Children
Joshua E. Livingston examines how Jesus blesses children to demonstrate the inverted shape of political agency in the kingdom of God.
Finding Stillness
Joanna Manning discovers the peaceful center to grief.
Every Word They Say Chagrins Us
Taylor Ross finds himself at a loss for words in the house of Bonhoeffer.
Wounds and the Wounded
Jack Harrell explores the reality of faith and doubt with two old friends and a shotgun.
Corpus Christi
Grace Kearney explores the link between Catholicism and medicine through three generations.
The Law of the Gospel: A Review of Philip Cary’s The Meaning of Protestant Theology in a Time of Protests
Chris E. W. Green considers Philip Cary’s The Meaning of Protestant Theology and asks how we are to handle the troubling history of theology.
Eucontamination: A Christian Study in the Logic of Disgust and Contamination
The Hoard brothers connect dog poop and sanctification.
Strawberry Picking
Martin Achatz strolls through strawberry fields in search of God.
Heart to Heart
Martin Achatz meditates on the crowded ventricles and atrias of maternal hearts.
Perinatal Eucharist
Katie Prudek Lin explores Christ as Mother, with a little help from Julian of Norwich and her own experience of childbirth.
Craftsman
Todd Copeland reflects on the gift of memory, tools, and family.
Hibernal
Todd Copeland reflects on darkness.
Demystifying Brotherhood: Interdependence, Integration, and the Dangerous Ethics of a Co-Opted Thinker
Andrew Stone Porter connects Martin Luther King Jr.’s politics of integration with his theological ethics of interdependence.
Of Spirit, Flesh, and Imagination
David Kline reflects on the Pentecostal and poetic imagination of the Minneapolis uprisings.
