Transubstantiate

Who knew two nonverbal rocks had so much to say?

I don’t remember the last time I said, “I love you” to my parents. In fact, I don’t think they’ve said that to me much either in the 30-something years of my existence.

For a Chinese Singaporean family, this is hardly out of the ordinary. Our affection for each other is mostly communicated through sharing food at mealtimes or through questions about how work has been.

But there’s another way that my parents—and grandparents, aunties, and uncles, for that matter—express affection for me: through biting, negatively framed opinions that hit you like a punch in the gut.

You’ve got more white hair now. You put on weight. You look so tired. (There’s also the all-encompassing “Aiyoh!” which usually conveys a mix of disappointment, disapproval, worry, and concern all at the same time.)

That is why, when watching Everything Everywhere All at Once at home one Friday evening, I cringe-laughed when the protagonist Evelyn Wang blurts this line out to her daughter Joy early in the film: “You have to try and eat healthier. You are getting fat.”

Such judgmental comments have become a tried-and-true method of communicating care and concern, bypassing anything gushy or sentimental. To be clear, this is not a condoning of verbal abuse, which exerts manipulative control over another. I speak of the pessimistic, unsympathetic sentiments that often color speech in a Chinese family.

Over the years, I’ve deflected remarks like these by laughing or shrugging them off rather than allowing them to take root. As I tell my husband when similar phrases roll off my tongue, these are simply words of “endearment.”

I used to view this inability to articulate “I …

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Bauxite mining would threaten birds, plants, and clean water.

A Christian conservation group is fighting the Ghana government in court over plans to mine bauxite in the Atewa Range Forest Reserve. The protected highland forest north of the capital, Accra, is home to more than 700 species of butterflies, 239 different birds, and 1,134 plants and also provides water for millions of people.

The government reportedly granted a license to the Chinese state-owned Sinohydro Corp. to mine bauxite and build a refinery for the production of aluminum to pay back a $2 billion loan for infrastructure projects across the country. Experts say the mine would be catastrophic for plants and wildlife, not to mention the climate and clean water.

“We thought that if we didn’t take this step of faith, then we would not have acted well as Christians who are stewards of God’s creation,” said Seth Appiah-Kubi, the national director of A Rocha Ghana. “We’ve done all we’ve done because we are Christians.”

A Rocha Ghana is leading the legal challenge, joined by six other civil society groups and four private citizens. The case was filed three years ago and made its way to the Accra High Court in February. The conservation group has never filed suit before.

“Even though we’ve done advocacy and campaigns as part of our work, this is the first time we’ve taken legal action,” Appiah-Kubi said. “It’s a big learning curve.”

Appiah-Kubi was the first witness when the hearing began February 6. He was cross-examined by a state lawyer for two days.

The conservation group and the other plaintiffs argue that mining the forest for bauxite would violate Ghana’s constitution, which protects citizens’ rights to a clean and healthy …

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She says her new book is “not just for me, but it’s also for the victims.”

One of Bill Gothard’s best-known followers recently became one of his most vocal critics.

Jinger Duggar Vuolo is the sixth kid in the Duggar family, made famous on TLC shows like 19 Kids and Counting. (Her name is pronounced “ginger;” all the siblings have names that begin with J.) The Duggars are known for the distinctive practices they learned through Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP): dressing modestly, courting before marriage, modeling their Christian faith, and having as many children as possible.

Last month, Vuolo released a spiritual memoir following her personal reckoning with what she considers Gothard’s false teachings and unbiblical, fear-based system. In Becoming Free Indeed, 29-year-old Vuolo “disentangles” her beliefs and joins a growing wave of Christians who say they have shifted and deepened their faith by leaving legalism.

In the book, she describes being constantly worried that God wanted to punish her disobedience—for not confessing some “secret sin,” playing broomball instead of praying, accidentally revealing her knees in a skirt, exposing herself to alcohol at the grocery store, even not eating enough fiber in her bread. In her 20s, she finally found a gracious God who made himself clear in his Word, without the need for Gothard’s rules and rhemas.

“A few years ago, it became abundantly clear to me that this man I had always looked up to as a model Christian was, in fact, no better than the false teachers Jesus and Paul described,” she wrote. “Gothard was not only teaching his own principles instead of Christ’s but reportedly harming those closest to him.”

With 1.4 million Instagram followers …

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Majority white churches can learn from the spiritual practices Black believers have cultivated for centuries.

Lent is a season of darkness just before the light that comes with the celebration of Eastertide—a time where we are reminded of our mortality. It is a period of reflection, repentance, and preparation when we seek the Lord in prayer and commit more deeply to Scripture, in addition to practicing almsgiving or engaging in self-control through fasting.

Each year the season of Lent briefly overlaps with Black History Month—and yet I’ve noticed there are very few resources on the potential ways in which these two traditions might engage.

As a biracial child, I was baptized in the Catholic church with my mom’s white side of the family, but I also spent time with my dad’s side of the family, who worshiped in a variety of Black churches. This created a unique experience for me, where I had some understanding of the liturgical calendar as well as an exposure to the Black church and its traditions.

I loved the liturgy in the Catholic church—the smell of the incense, the reading of Scripture each week—but I also loved the Spirit-filled worship of my Black family on my dad’s side.

Many of the more liturgical spaces I’d worshiped in lacked the celebratory and charismatic aspects of my experience in Black churches, which felt like a significant deficit. So, I tried to find a tradition that made space for both things, which has ultimately led me into vocational ministry within the Anglican church.

The churches my dad’s family attended did not observe Lent, but they faithfully engaged in the spiritual practices associated with it, such as prayer, reading of Scripture, service, repentance.

Their congregations did, however, have jubilant Black History Month celebrations—lamenting …

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While tens of thousands flocked to campus, school officials met in a storage closet to make decisions that would “honor what is happening.”

The shofars didn’t start until Saturday. With them came the would-be prophets seeking to take center stage at the Asbury University chapel where students had been praying and praising God since Wednesday morning; the would-be leaders who wanted to claim the revival for their ministries, their agendas, and celebrity; and the would-be disrupters, coming to break up whatever was happening at the small Christian school in Kentucky with heckling, harangues, and worse.

But by Saturday, Asbury University was ready.

The school had not planned an outpouring of the Spirit. But when something started to happen in the middle of the first week of February—the middle of the semester, a few days before the Super Bowl—an impromptu mix of administrators, staff, faculty, friends, and university neighbors quickly mobilized. They gathered in a storage closet off the side of Hughes Auditorium and then repurposed a classroom to facilitate and support whatever it was that God was doing.

As word spread, the crowds came, and debates raged online about whether this was a “real” revival, these men and women worked untold hours to make sure that everyone who sought God had food and water and restrooms and everyone was safe. Part of the story behind the story of the revival is the almost invisible work that went into protecting it.

“There were 100 people volunteering at any one time, just to make these services work on the fly,” Asbury University president Kevin Brown told CT. “There was a classroom that got redeployed into almost a command center. If you walked in, there were flow charts on the wall and the whiteboards were covered with information. There was a volunteer check-in station. … It was …

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Even our most beautiful rituals and reflections can’t bring relief from the reality of death.

I started going to Ash Wednesday services when I was working in New York City, in an office a few blocks from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. From the sidewalk, the cathedral is intimidating, all filigree and turrets. Inside, though, it’s intimate, quiet, and dark, save for a little light filtered through its rose window.

I went to the cathedral only on special occasions like Ash Wednesday, when the professional choir would sing polyphony and spirituals and Gregorian chants. It was astoundingly beautiful, that music—perfectly tuned and perfectly in time, slipping through the incense and the jewel-toned light. I cried in the pew, got my cross of ashes, and went back to work.

Was it wrong to look forward to a service about a subject—my sin, my death—that I was supposed to face with fear and trembling? Maybe. But how could I help it?

It was the same as when we sang requiems and dirges in my college choir, learning the Latin words for loss and telling the story of the Crucifixion in coloratura. In the Howells Requiem, in Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions, death moved the choir, and death moved our audience. We’d accept our applause, file from the concert hall, and head off to the afterparty, relieved of a burden we didn’t know we were carrying.

This kind of catharsis isn’t an uncommon experience, even among Christians. There can be a strange beauty in the difficult and the macabre, in silence and penitence. “Lent is my favorite season,” a friend recently told me. “Well, not my favorite. That’s the wrong word. You know what I mean.” And I did. “I’m looking forward to Lent,” said another. That’s not wrong, per se. Many …

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Four other congregations with female pastors were also determined to be not in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC, as well as one removed over its abuse response.

One of the country’s biggest and best-known megachurches, Saddleback Church, is no longer a part of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) after bringing on a female teaching pastor last year.

Saddleback was among five churches with female pastors who were deemed “no longer in friendly cooperation” with the denomination at a meeting of the SBC Executive Committee in Nashville on Tuesday.

The Lake Forest, California, congregation ordained three women from the stage in May 2021, a decision that rattled some Southern Baptists who believe the role of pastor is reserved for men. Then last year, Saddleback selected Andy Wood as Rick Warren’s successor and the church’s lead pastor, and his wife Stacie Wood came on as a teaching pastor.

Warren responded to calls for the SBC to cut ties with his church at the convention’s June 2022 annual meeting, held in Anaheim, California. “Are we going to keep bickering over secondary issues,” he said, “or are we going to keep the main thing the main thing?”

At the time, the credentials committee—the group tasked with recommending whether to disfellowship a particular church—hadn’t come to a decision on Saddleback, saying it wasn’t clear if the SBC’s statement of faith restricted women from any position doing pastoral work or with a pastoral title, or if it just applied to the senior pastor.

“I could talk to you all about what I believe about the gift of pastorate as opposed to the office of pastorate, but I’m not here to talk about that,” Warren remarked, spending most of his time at the mic reflecting on his decades-long history with the SBC.

This week, the committee …

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The Premier League winger known for his faith was killed in the earthquake in Turkey.

Christian Atsu kicked his last goal on February 5. He ran up to the soccer ball and slammed it with his deft left foot, shooting it past 10 opposing players and a goalie in the fifth minute of extra time. The ball found the back of the net, breaking a 0-0 tie and lifting his team to euphoric victory.

Atsu was a long way from the dirt-and-rock pitches where he learned to play barefoot in Ghana. But through all the changes—from poverty to professional soccer, international fame playing for Ghana, the highs and lows of the British Premier League, and then a new challenge with a team in Antakya, Turkey—he held fast to his faith.

“God’s power has to be manifested in my life for people to see how far he has brought me,” Atsu once told a reporter. “The Bible says it is not by our hard work. … It is not just by my hard work, though I am working hard, but it is the will of God, the grace of God, that has brought me this far.”

The day after he scored the winning goal, February 6, Atsu’s apartment building collapsed in the 7.8 earthquake that reduced the ancient city of Antioch to rubble. He went missing for nearly two weeks. On Saturday, February 18, authorities finally confirmed Atsu was one of the tens of thousands who died in the disaster.

In Newcastle, where Atsu played for four years as a winger and helped the team win promotion to the Premier League, fans applauded him for a full minute before a game on Saturday. Television showed his wife and two young children crying in the stands as 52,000 people in the stadium sung out his name.

“It’s just devastating—he’s 31,” said Johnny Ferguson, Atsu’s pastor at Hillsong Newcastle UK. “One thing …

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Christians should cherish words in a disposable age.

When I was a boy, a whole room of my grandmother’s home was dedicated to her library. Thousands of books filled dark, neat shelves. Art deco prints from Maxfield Parrish lined the walls with images of ruined pillars and children lounging in blue sunsets. An antique bronze of Hermes, god of language, faced the door, right hand raised to heaven, face cast upward. That library was not only a place of knowledge or entertainment; it was almost sacred. Standing on thick carpet, one breathed quietly the smell of aged paper. Each word held there was precious.

Christianity joyfully affirms that language is worthy of such honor. After all, “In the beginning was the Word,” John 1:1 states, and the theme of word can be traced brilliantly through the entire Bible. Christians, extending the Jewish tradition, have been known for ages as “people of the Book.” What happens when we write and speak is something holy.

But today, we live in a crisis of language. Not only is the sacred nature of our words largely forgotten, but language is becoming degraded. In a world of significant social, ecological, and spiritual crisis, this may seem like a low priority. But healthy language, like clean air or water, is something we take for granted until it is gone. And if language falls, so do uncountable other things upon which human well-being depends.

This crisis has been growing for many decades. In 1946, George Orwell, novelist and one of the great defenders of language, opened his essay “Politics and the English Language” with “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about …

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The divisions between these “parties” are important. So are the divisions within them.

Jesus’ caution in Luke 12:2, “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known,” certainly proved prescient in the case of white evangelicals. Oceans of ink have been spilled on nearly every facet of their existence, while recitations of their sins have become a daily ritual on social media. The scrutiny is so intense that it is easy to forget it is a relatively new phenomenon, especially among scholars.

There was rising interest in evangelicalism in the 1980s and 1990s, amid the heyday of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. Over the course of those decades, a cohort of evangelical historians, led by the likes of George Marsden and Mark Noll, salvaged their tradition from the academic dustheap. Having set out with the relatively modest goal of identifying “gold among the dross,” in Marsden’s choice turn of phrase, they ended up rewriting the history of Christianity in the United States, with evangelicalism as the throughline.

This entailed rehabilitating the fundamentalists, whose pugnaciousness was excessive, to be sure, but also understandable given the extent of early-20th-century liberal Protestants’ assault on Christian orthodoxy. The neo-evangelicals fared better in this revised story too. While the worlds that developed around Billy Graham exhibited serious flaws—with anti-intellectualism and jingoistic nationalism at the top of the list—they at least resisted the temptation to bend Christian doctrine to fit contemporary whims. With the mainline on a long and well-intentioned slide into de facto apostasy, evangelicals were the truest heirs of a Protestant lineage stretching back through Jonathan Edwards and …

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