“Are You a Christian?”
I can picture it now: the old man with a scowl eyes me suspiciously from the bed as I stand in the hospital room doorway. He has just come out of open heart surgery, or has been given a terminal cancer diagnosis this morning, or he’s here to live out his last days with the help of some good strong meds. I am his chaplain, and he asks me one devastating four-word question: “Are you a Christian?”
Is Pluralist Scripture Possible?
Spending a year reading the Bible to seven year-olds in a Unitarian Universalist church, I learned to walk a very fine line – between narrating stories and sharing Scripture. Even as a non-Christian, if I speak of these tales as nothing more than “old stories,” I feel I’m being a bit disingenuous. After all, they’re more than that. Aren’t they?
The Church of Mall
I grew up in one of the biggest mall towns in America; a commercial capital, another kind of religious heartland, where the faithful make regular pilgrimages from points far and near. The mall and the commercial culture it represented was my first house of worship.
Lee Paczulla
Lee is an MDiv candidate at Harvard Divinity School, preparing for ordination as a Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister. She spent the last five years doing community-based youth development and health action work in Washington, DC, and has a BA in psychology and women’s studies from Swarthmore College.
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Contributing Scholars
Rhee-Soo LeeRhee-Soo is currently a Master of Divinity candidate at Harvard Divinity School, focusing on Christianity. She is a recent graduate of Wesleyan University, and prior to attending HDS, she completed a year-long fellowship with the Episcopal Service Corps in Boston.
Sara Williams StaleySara is a student at Yale Divinity School, where she is working toward a Master of Religious Studies with a concentration in ethics. Her research interest lies broadly in the role of faith communities in religiously charged conflicts and more particularly in the conversation between American evangelical and postliberal theologies as it relates to the construction of an evangelical ethic for interreligious engagement.
C. Nikole SaulsberryA 2009 Syracuse University Alumna, Nikole is currently serving an AmeriCorps term with New Sector Alliance, Inc. as a Resident in Social Enterprise. Her interfaith work is focused on fostering religious pluralism through simultaneous efforts of common action, policy engagement, liberation theology and hermeneutics of social justice.