Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
Last week I asked our Sunday School class what Christianity had to stay woke about in church history. In no time they came up with antisemitism, racism, and feminism. That last one has been front and center lately. I always start trying to understand what is going on by remembering what happened in the New […]
Let’s see where we are so far. My goal is to provide some insight since woke is increasingly being used by politicians as a derogatory label for their opponents. It’s hard to nail down the term’s core meaning because they are most interested in its emotional connotations, especially those conveying disloyalty. I am suggesting the […]
If religion is by nature “woke,” the spiritual wakes us up to what is hidden and sometimes upsetting about ourselves and our institutions. This applies even to the church. We can begin examining how this works with racism from which the term comes. Back in the 1930s, the Black American singer Lead Belly talked about […]
All the great world religions could be said to be “woke” in the sense that awareness is a basic teaching. They all claim to discern reality. That might be described as facing the truth, providing a healthy way of life, bringing us into harmony with the grain of the universe, or doing God’s will. In […]
Many of my friends at some time in the past year have asked, “Exactly what is ‘woke’ anyway?” It’s usually in response to politicians using the term in a derogatory way, in mockery as if something “woke” is silly or in anger as if it is dangerous. My understanding is “woke” goes back a long […]
I had two surprises doing this series. The first was I did not anticipate how comprehensive compassion was going to be. I started out simply seeking a broader Christian approach than nonviolence for resolving our society’s conflicts. Compassion expressed empathy but also a desire to alleviate the situation. It went so far as being willing […]
I decided a good way to bring this series together was to reread Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. Many regard it as the classic treatment of compassion in our time. My guess is many, if not most of our readers resonate with her position. Armstrong believes compassion is the basic teaching of […]
The most difficult theological task is explaining the atonement. There have been many theories, but none are completely satisfying in our day. I was surprised how frequently I turned to compassion in the past few months when trying to understand the crucifixion. It at least offered clarity missing in the traditional explanations. During the same […]
Right from the beginning, I regarded compassion as more than being emotional about something. I thought it could be a guiding light in overcoming our divisions because it involves empathy that considers what the other person or group thinks. It didn’t take long to realize the term is more complex. In the Bible, compassion not […]
I have been considering how compassion might be a guiding light for overcoming the deep divisions in our church and society. Underlying this quest is the conviction that we are in one of the major periods of change in human history, one that rivals the first-century birth of Christianity, the fourth-century adoption as the religion […]
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