The Rev. Dr. Anna Case-Winters, who has taught theology at McCormick Theological Seminary for 35 years, wasn’t all gloom and doom Wednesday during the Leading Theologically podcast hosted twice each month by the Rev. Dr. Lee Hinson-Hasty of the Presbyterian Foundation.
In addition to the transitions everyone’s endured during the pandemic, the clergy team of the Rev. Mihee Kim-Kort and the Rev. Dr. Andy Kort said goodbye last year to the church he served, First Presbyterian Church in Bloomington, Indiana, and hello to the church they’re currently serving as co-pastors, First Presbyterian Church of Annapolis in Maryland.
The Rev. Dr. Katharine Rhodes Henderson has already announced her plan to transition as president of Auburn Seminary in New York City. So when she was asked this week during Leading Theologically about the work her soul must have, a famous question posed by the Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, Henderson was ready.
Who are the “nones,” the more than 50% of the U.S. population who told Gallup pollsters last year they no longer belong to a church, synagogue or mosque?
Many preachers get a little antsy about preaching on and around secular holidays, among them the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Mother’s Day — and that biggest secular holiday of all, Super Bowl Sunday. In their minds, the culture and the church ought to be kept at arm’s length from one another.
While the Rev. Brian Ellison didn’t realize it at the time, umpiring T-ball games as a youth can be job training for work as a stated clerk, which Ellison does for both the Synod of Mid-America and Heartland Presbytery.
The Rev. Dr. Lee Hinson-Hasty of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Committee on Theological Education, host of the podcast “Leading Theologically,” likes to start off the Facebook Live events by asking his guest, “What is making you come alive?”
What you are going to find in “The Purpose Gap: Empowering Communities of Color to Find Meaning and Thrive,” a book published in March by Westminster John Knox Press and written by the Rev. Dr. Patrick Reyes, are, as Reyes writes in the introduction, “stories, studies, and dreams about care for the conditions of our lives, of our communities, and of our bodies. For one to thrive, understanding the conditions that already surround us (and others) is the first step. For so many of us, purpose is defined, stolen, or withheld before we even enter the world. The question now is ‘How do we understand and influence these conditions?’”
With each of his guests on the podcast Leading Theologically, the Rev. Dr. Lee Hinson-Hasty opens with the same question: what is making you come alive?
On Wednesday, the Rev. Laura Mariko Cheifetz, a PC(USA) pastor and the assistant dean of Admissions, Vocation and Stewardship at the Vanderbilt University School of Divinity, had a ready answer.
The Rev. Dr. Gregory Ellison II has discovered heaven on Earth. For him it involves spending time at the Haley Farm in Clinton, Tennessee, with others who admire, as he does, the late Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, one of Christianity’s most celebrated authors, preachers, scholars and mystics — and then being asked to edit a book on Thurman.
