Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
Let’s examine how the question about the future is handled in the Christmas story. Matthew and Luke ask how there can be a child in the future if there is no sexual relationship. How can there be a future if the imperial empire forces a woman to travel in the final stages of pregnancy? How […]
The goal was to find some help from Christianity in answering the question, “Is there a future in light of the present world situation?” The first thing that struck me was that the fatalism many of us fight is derived from what is happening around us. How can you be optimistic, considering what is happening? […]
Karen echoes what I hear from many friends when she writes, “Maybe we need to explore healthy optimism as a positive result of faith. I feel overwhelmed by the events of day-to-day living that make it feel like there is little likelihood of positive change coming. It is often hard to keep showing up and […]
I started this series by observing many of my friends were asking “What exactly is woke?” After about two months, I am willing to define it as awareness, a basic value in all the great world religions. They all claim to discern reality that is described as facing the truth, providing a healthy way of […]
Last week, I suggested we are in a cultural revolution in which people turn to name-calling and invoking God when rational arguments fail. One reason I decided to write on Woke Christianity is I’m surprised that more people are not in an uproar over the misuse of God in this conflict. MAGA claims our nation […]
Last week a dear Black American friend said she regretted not being able to use Woke any more. She was referring to politicians making it a term of derision but also all sorts of other causes including themselves in a part of black culture. Hearing her say this made me aware how involved the issue […]
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 […]
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