Page 16 - Intervarsity Press News Today

February 4, 2021 My story is common to those who exist on the margins — those who have gone unseen and been disregarded because they have not mattered enough to people who believe that being poor means that you are somehow less human and unworthy of the same love that we all seek. However, as everyone across the world reaches out for one another in a new climate of enforced physical distancing due to COVID-19, the cracks in our systems of care — the symptoms of our failure to care — are ...

This article is part of the 5 Myths series. Myth #1: Marriage, as we know it in this age, is the final destiny of any human. My mother was killed in a bus collision near Bethlehem in Israel in 1974. She was fifty-six years old and had been married to my father for thirty-seven years. As the grief began to heal, God gave my father another wonderful wife. I rejoice in this. But it has caused me to take much more seriously the words of Jesus to the Sadducees concerning marriage in the resurrection...

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Just as the Great Commandment requires us to actively love our neighbors, the Great Requirement commands us to further the cause of justice.  The first part of this requirement, “act justly,” obligates believers to take affirmative steps toward promoting justice. Like love, justice is more than merely the lack of injustice. Justice is substantiv...

2020 May Finally Be Over, But the Plight of Refugees and Other Immigrants Is Not Many immigrants and refugees have long known the anguish and loneliness of being separated from family. Matthew Soerens 2020 was a hard year. The coronavirus pandemic upended lives and forced millions of Americans to stay socially distanced and isolated. Many spent Christmas apart from family for the first time ever. As we enter the new year, I know we’re all yearning for a return to normal so that we can reunite...

The power of gratitude is the ability to see the good. More specifically, a grateful person is free to see the good. When we give thanks, our eyes are opened and our hearts can understand. Simply having eyes doesn’t guarantee sight. Eyes must be opened in order to see. The reason we often don’t see things correctly is that we see things as we want them to be, not as they really are. Most people are blinded by greed or desire, or their vision is skewed. But a grateful person is afforded a...

12 . 22 . 20 The Bible is America’s best-selling book, annually outpacing the top 20 best sellers combined. Yet a single Chinese company has a near monopoly on Bible printing, meaning that any rupture in the supply chain—say, from U.S. or Chinese government policies—would lead to a Bible shortage in America. This poses a serious threat both to American Christians’ fundamental religious liberty rights and to national security.  More than 20 million Protestant and Catholic Bibles are pri...

An excerpt from CT’s Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year. Here is the full list of CT’s 2021 Book Award winners. I was eight years old the first time someone called me a nigger. It happened in elementary school one morning when I started to feel sick. I was in bad enough shape to call my mother at her factory job at Chrysler. I dutifully went to the school office, where they dialed the number on the emergency contact card and handed me the phone. Nervously, I asked to speak with Laurie McC...

(Unsplash/Chris Orcutt) D.L. Mayfield is a prophet constantly traveling a path of conversion. From white evangelical homeschooled girl, to Bible-college grad gearing up to go on mission to convert people to Christ, to downwardly mobile neighbor of Muslim Somali Bantu refugees, she finds that God has a funny way of challenging her drive to "convince people of the rightness of her cause." Her latest book presents itself as a critique of the American dream when, in reality, it is...

Image: Courtesy of Chauncey Allmond Chauncey Allmond dreams of a day when white evangelical preachers will reference the work of African American Bible scholars without even thinking about it. He and his colleagues at Logos Bible Software hope they can make that happen by adding more African American voices to the digital study tools currently used by more than 4.5 million people. “The African American voice is a powerful voice that needs to be heard,” Allmond said. “There’...