Our cultural values are making us sad: money, mortality, and fear of missing out.

In a video chat last night, a friend admitted, “I’ve been crying a lot, and I’m not sure why.” COVID-19 has given us many reasons to weep. We’re out of our routines, the stock market has plunged, and we imagine millions dying. This virus and economic crisis punch us squarely where our spiritual armor is weakest: mortality, money, and our fear of missing out.

In 2 Corinthians 7, Paul distinguishes between two kinds of sorrow—a sorrow that “leads to death,” and a “godly sorrow.” The latter “brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret” (v. 10). Godly sorrow, he writes, produces “earnestness,” eagerness to repent, and a “longing” and “readiness to see justice done” (v. 11). The question the church faces now is which kind of sorrow COVID-19 will bring.

We are in the midst of the most widespread societal upheaval that many people alive today have ever experienced. Already our institutions, habits, relationships, and culture are shifting before our eyes. Frank M. Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society, shared with the New Yorker, “Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are.” The question we are facing is not whether we will experience sorrow and change; the question is how. As biblical prophets walked with people through catastrophes, their advice was never to just endure until it ends. Instead they focused on proactively changing relationships with each other and with God.

As a cultural anthropologist who grew up in a middle-class white United States home and then lived for much of my adult life in Nicaragua, China, and South Africa, ...

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Ahmaud Arbery and tragedy in Brunswick, Georgia.

Coastal Georgia’s Perfect Storm

Hurricane season is especially busy in coastal Georgia. As a native of Brunswick, Georgia, I remember evacuating the city on several occasions with my family growing up. Residents of Brunswick, a small town of moss-laden, tree-lined streets normally spend this season watching Doppler radars. But for the past several months, they have watched police and news reports.

Like the rest of America, they were quarantined. But they became increasingly unsettled at stories of a young black man reportedly getting chased down and shot in his own neighborhood while jogging down the street. Little did Brunswick residents know, they were tracking the perfect storm.

The Fatal Run

Jogging isn’t supposed to get you killed. On February 23rd, Ahmaud Arbery became a heartbreaking, fatal exception as he jogged through his own neighborhood. Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down on a street intended to be a safe space for him. As he ran through the neighborhood that morning, he likely never thought he’d be fighting for his life in broad daylight.

The First Narrative

As a lawyer with close ties to Brunswick, I wanted to help. My brother, who coached Arbery in high school, reached out to me about the shooting and inquired about next steps. Together, we helped coordinate local efforts to galvanize Brunswick’s citizens to help discover the truth surrounding the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery. And what we started to discover was troubling.

For starters, initial news reports highlighted Arbery’s past (unrelated) felony convictions, while subjectively reporting the facts covered in the incident report.

What if Martha Stewart, another felon, suffered the same fate? Would the story also discuss her record at ...

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Even as technology made communication quicker, these Coptic leaders ministered through snail mail.

In his rural New Jersey home, Wafik Habib carefully laid out his letter collection before us, now more than a half century old. Handwritten by the late Bishop Samuel to the physician, they represented the bishop’s pastoral care to a nascent diaspora Christian community started in 1950s North America. We could sense the bishop’s presence in the words of comfort and exhortation set to pen and paper.

A few years before our visit to Habib to read his letters from Bishop Samuel, we opened up our own airmail from Egypt. It was a greeting card from Abadir El-Souriany, an elderly monk at the Syrian Monastery of St. Mary. (In the Coptic tradition, bishops are denoted by a single name at ordination and monks are referred to by their first name and the monastery where they serve.)

The card smelled of the Egyptian desert. In it, we found words of blessing.

Abadir had pastored our family in Sudan decades before. Now, newly ordained and assigned to a Coptic Orthodox Church in New Jersey, we received the warm words of Abadir’s letter. They ministered to us as only words from a lifelong pastor to diaspora congregations could.

Of course, sending letters from a distance to churches the Coptic church leaders planted or communities they served follows an apostolic tradition that dates back to the New Testament. Though these letters were addressed to individuals, rather than entire congregations, they achieved the same end: the spread of Christianity, the planting of new churches in new places, and the spiritual growth of these new congregations.

Following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Bishop Samuel, Abadir maintained the relationships he built through letter-writing. The Syrian Monastery—located in a region called ...

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The unfortunate truth is that even in our ability to retreat into ignorance, we betray the disparity in our experiences and the systemic injustice in our culture.

For many in America, responding to the seemingly-endless shootings of African Americans has become a horrific form of muscle memory. After yet another tragedy like the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery occurs, we see similar patterns: an initial burst of reporting, followed quickly by social media commentary, followed by think-pieces across various platforms, followed by social media commentary on the think-pieces.

Within a week, however, the entire matter is tied up nicely and everyone is able to move on. Most of us forget as we return to being engrossed in our lives, only to be thrust back into this cycle when another new shooting is jarring enough to penetrate the blaring noise of our daily news-cycle.

The fact that Arbery was killed in February and many didn’t know until May speaks to our dependence upon images to incite response—a dependency that, as many have pointed out, dehumanizes victims and establishes a bar of proof we don’t demand of others.

Moreover, the fact that only images push us to take seriously these stories underlines the frenetic nature of our media landscape. So few stories not drenched in the political and culture wars theming our day are able to rise above the chaos to capture our attention. That many are feeling oversaturated and digitally burned out during our current crisis has only exacerbated this problem of ignorance.

The unfortunate truth is that even in our ability to retreat into ignorance, we betray the disparity in our experiences and the systemic injustice in our culture. While this story (despite being so relevant and discussed currently) will fade for most of us, for others this story is their experience. They carry it with them when they wonder if it is safe to go for runs in ...

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Parenting children requires a rich understanding of God’s nature.

Mothers today face an onslaught of mixed messages about how best to parent in the 21st century. Podcasts, blogs, and books on mommy-ing abound, but many of them indulge regularly in shallow parenting advice and fallacies about excessive self-care or “me-time.”

In the midst of the coronavirus quarantine, moms on social media often advise diametrically opposed strategies: Take regular mental health breaks while your children gorge on Netflix, or schedule out every minute of children’s at-home education so they don’t fall behind in productivity. The message seems to be either “love yourself first” or “pour all your energy into your children’s future.”

Neither side answers the more important question: How do we mother like Jesus Christ during this particular cultural moment? In the words of an overused adage, “What would Jesus do?”

In Motherhood: A Confession, Natalie Carnes, associate professor of theology at Baylor University, attempts to answer this question by sharing her personal experience of raising three daughters. She follows the structure and style of Augustine’s autobiography, Confessions, and elevates the conversation about motherhood from the self-centered to the spiritual without ever losing touch with the beauty of the ordinary. Part memoir and part theological study, Motherhood: A Confession explores “how motherhood, infancy, and children disclose what it means to be human in relation to the divine.”

Carnes’s core argument is that mothering imitates God. We birth forth disciples, hand down tradition, and grow our children into the church. By knowing the maternal attributes of God, we better mother our own children, and we also ...

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The group’s latest album offers a timely message for this global moment.

Is a pandemic the best time or the worst time to release an album of children’s music based on the Psalms? Musicians Flo Paris Oakes, Sandra McCracken, and Katy Bowser Hutson hope that All Creatures, the fourth album from their musical collective Rain for Roots, reaches the world at just the right time and offers hope in the midst of a storm. The album explores the emotional range of Israel’s original songbook and points listeners to God’s glory made manifest in creation.

The three Nashville musicians talked with Megan Fowler about their project, which just released.

The three previous Rain for Roots albums have focused on Bible stories, parables, and Advent. What was the inspiration for All Creatures?

McCracken: We started out talking about Psalms, and then all these images of creation were so present in the themes that were coming up. So we started paying attention to that. A secondary theme that emerged was songs, loosely based on Psalms, but then creation and the creatures that we saw calling us into worship. It’s not strictly a praise album, but a praise album by way of the Psalms, by way of the owls and birds.

Hutson: When you say it that way, Sandra, the two themes that kind of run through are, one, there’s so much of seeing how God reveals who he is in the natural world; and two, yes, there’s so much beautiful praise, but there’s also lament and fear. I like that the Psalms are such a great way to display, to young ones in particular, that all of the range of emotions are okay to bring before the face of God.

Oakes: And that God is with us, not just in this spiritual realm, but in our humanity. God is with us in every bit of the physical world.

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How the pandemic concentrated pressures on small churches—and how the body of Christ is stepping up to help, one $3,000 grant at a time.

Philadelphia pastor Kevin Cropper’s heart sank last month when he saw a message asking for food among the prayer requests emailed to his church.

“It was a request for something tangible, and we didn’t have it,” Cropper said.

His congregation, Ark of Safety Christian Church, had canceled its weekly food distribution since it ran out of donations when it stopped gathering in March. “It makes you feel bad because isn’t that what our mission is? We want to be able to help in this type of crisis, but we need the resources to do it.”

That’s the problem with being a small, inner-city black church during a pandemic. Black adults are more than twice as likely as whites or Hispanic Americans to know someone who has been hospitalized or died due to COVID-19. Their communities are afraid, grieving, and suffering from the virus themselves; and they are far less likely to have the staff, budgets, or space to help as much as they feel called.

“We are in the city. We don’t have acres, we stay close to each other, and it’s very easy to spread the virus,” said Kato Hart Jr., pastor of Hold the Light Ministries, a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) congregation in Detroit.

American counties with a higher-than-average proportion of black residents now account for half of coronavirus cases and 60 percent of deaths. Even in a church of 50, word keeps spreading of which members have lost relatives to the virus: aunties, uncles, grandparents. Hart has lost fellow brothers in ministry, citing a letter from denominational leadership saying 30 COGIC bishops have fallen to COVID-19—including a dozen in Michigan alone.

“We’re in a fight, and we need help. These megachurches, ...

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I wish the world saw me as a Christian first, not as a threat.

I was on my morning run as the sun was rising in the blue California skies. There was hardly anybody out at that time. You learn real young not to run too early in the morning or too late at night.

I guess I forgot the lessons, the safety agenda my parents taught me. They knew what would happen. I brought my identification like my wife tells me to every time I leave. During the run, I wasn’t worried about anything, and I felt good. I couldn’t wait to check my pace on my fitness tracker.

Then it happened. I looked in the distance, and there was this white man on his porch taking photos of me. Every shot he took, I got more confused. I said, “It’s a good morning out here, isn’t it?” as if me being respectable was going to shield me in this situation or get him to finally see me as a human.

He didn’t answer. Here we go again.

My fear quickly turned to rage. I wanted to fight for my dignity in the face of being documented by a stranger and being told I didn’t belong here. Policed by a man standing on his front porch. Right there in Southern California, the ghost of Jim Crow’s “What are you doing here, n—r?” showed up.

But ultimately, I felt powerless. I couldn’t even call the cops because they might’ve mistaken me for the aggressor. This is what black men have to deal with, while others can enjoy their runs. Again and again, year after year. This rage forces me to be angry about our reality and have the faith to believe that better is possible.

But on that day last year, my rage that turned into deep sadness. On the walk home, I stopped, bowed my head, and cried. These were not tears of weakness. I cried because I felt what many of those who looked ...

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How politicians and leaders on both the Left and Right fail to adequately aid mothers.

Every election cycle, women’s issues are a flashpoint in the public square. This year is no exception: Candidates on both sides are debating abortion, equal pay, family leave, and maternal mortality.

These political clashes often hinge on deeply held views about who women are, how they’re wired, and what they need. One of the most salient aspects of female identity is our maternal nature—the inclination (broadly speaking) to foster enduring ties with our offspring. Gender essentialism is fraught with land mines and dangerous generalities, and not all women experience the maternal pull. Nonetheless, most of us would agree that women’s biology is in fact distinctive, and the innate potential to bear children and bond with them not only carries great weight for the family but also shapes our commonwealth.

The political Left and Right mishandle these maternal instincts in different ways. For hard-line progressives, female “nature” is a social construct to embrace or escape—it doesn’t serve a normative purpose. We see this view play out legislatively. Liberal Democrats rightly pride themselves on defending family-friendly policies. But they concurrently promote pro-abortion policies that treat a woman’s bond with her child as entirely voluntary and even arbitrary—severed here, supported there. “To Planned Parenthood, an undesired life is no life at all,” writes Russell Moore in National Review.

Those on the Right have a nearly inverse enigma. Both center-right and far-right Republicans tend to value a woman’s distinct maternal nature and the children who come with it. But that helping hand comes up short in other arenas, as mothers are too often left to ...

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