Culture Crossings l where culture+justice+church intersect
Tonight, the world shares our doorstep. Argentina, France, the Czek Republic, Bulgaria, Romania - they sing and dance and for a moment forget that wars rage, and people die, and bills plague. They have come to watch the World play futball on a tiny screen on a big planet, but this corner of Razgrad has [...]
Lazarus danced a jig. Well, he did. Sometimes our scripture imagination becomes a myopia of what we see on the written page and we can begin to think that the entirety of Jesus' life were the bullet points we find in the Gospels. Now, they are the authoritative version, verified by ancient counsels of Godly [...]
All of us want to see Lazarus dancing. On June 14, our family begins a journey that will last until August. We will be continuously on the road : from our home in Budapest to Romania to Bulgaria to Moldova to Poland, to Denmark, back to Hungary, back to Bulgaria, and then home to [...]
Ever wonder why God has to be so difficult? If anybody has the resources to crush slavery, to end death, to bring peace, certainly it is God. We celebrate His resurrection. His power over sin, His victory over death. This moment in our human framework when Jesus just walked right through Hell's doorway and back into [...]
A few years back, when Gorbachev and Reagan chatted over a wall that fell, the Soviet Union ceased to be and we brought out sketch pads and sharpened our pencils and carved the map of Europe into fields of responsibility for the Church of the Nazarene. We called them things like the CIS, which meant the [...]
It begins where many of us would simply not dare to live. It begins with centuries of violence and disputes over political lines and ancient religious differences and deep-seated ethnic divisions. It begins with death on both sides of a border. And a breakaway republic that bravely declares itself its own, regardless of who may [...]
"The girls made cookies yesterday." Bee tells me this as we chat. 'The girls? Ohhh, THOSE girls.' Hands that have been unwillingly forced to trace the lines of a man's body Wrists that have been tied and bloodied Mouths that have screamed a million unheard screams Eyes that have seen the real live demons housed in humanity Making [...]
When you sell people, you get a bargain. The maintenance is relatively cheap - a human can live and function with remarkably small amounts of cheap food. The product is easily controlled, especially if you own something of theirs. Burning their baby is highly effective, if you let them hear the pitiful screams. Consider buying as [...]
'What in the world do missionaries do?' A difficult question to answer. To some, missionary is a four-letter word. For others, it is one gigantic mystery: one of those words that we know by Webster definition but beyond that, we have no real context for understanding. Sure, if we are the church-going type, we know [...]
Her screams tore through the night pulling us from the peace of our dreams and like dominoes down a corridor, blurry eyes peered around doors to encounter a woman deposited in the middle of the hotel’s corridor, like someone’s bag of trash. She glared back at us from a defiantly misplaced heap. “What is [...]
teanna sunberg 