By Molly T. Marshall After my friend Dan Aleshire moved from Louisville to Pittsburgh to join the staff of the Association of Theological Schools, I asked him about the process of locating a new church. He offered an interesting reflection:…
Renewing the Poor People’s Campaign
By Molly T. Marshall This week I attended a forum at a large African-American church in Kansas City, Mo., which assembled to probe and hopefully jumpstart King’s idea of the Poor People’s Campaign. The room was filled equally with black…
Renewing the Poor People’s Campaign
Igniting spirited witness
By Molly T. Marshall Witness is a word that has fallen out of favor in many Christian circles. Maybe it was never as popular as our memory assumes since, after all, the word means “martyr.” It still works in the…
Completing a life
By Molly T. Marshall The most detailed stories of Christ’s Nativity come from Luke, who includes lovely vignettes in the early childhood of Jesus. Luke has shown the parents of Jesus to be faithful to the laws of Rome. Now…
How widely Jesus ranges
By Molly T. Marshall They just kept coming. Clad in colorful traditional dress, the varied ethnic tribes, primarily from the hill country, announced their presence through their distinctive attire. Many had traveled up to six days, partly on foot, to…
Not particularly grateful
By Molly T. Marshall Travel recently took me to Andalusia, ancestral home of Flannery O’Connor in Milledgeville, Ga. I had not visited the home in person, but only through the ways in which her novels and short stories were grounded…
Finding God in the suffering
By Molly T. Marshall With relentless coverage, the world is caught up in the riveting images coming out of the Philippines. Our ever-warming world careens from one disaster to another, each described as of “epic proportion,” ostensibly meaning that they…
A feast of ‘splendid nobodies’
By Molly T. Marshall Each fall I teach a course titled “Spirituality and Creativity” with the entering cohort in our create program, a rather up-tempo form of the master of divinity. We meet at Conception Abbey, a hospitable Benedictine monastery…
Crafting a disciplined life
By Molly T. Marshall A recent book by Mason Currey on the daily rituals of artistic people has captured wide attention. He chronicles the patterns — some odd and eccentric — that empower creativity of writers, painters, inventors, musicians and…
Locating the church
By Molly T. Marshall Identifying the true markers that locate the church has been an ongoing debate since the early centuries of Christianity. Unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity were the classic marks distinguishing the new expression of the people of…
Weeping over violence
By Molly T. Marshall The most recent shooting in Washington, D.C., reached in to our seminary community. Early Monday morning I received a phone call from a treasured board member whose son was in the building adjacent to where the…