The Other Journal

12/20/2024

“I believe that we’re all a little like Joseph; we all limit ourselves by our tried-and-true ways of doing things. We each have our own ways of dealing with personal, spiritual, and professional matters, our own ways of moving through this demanding season of the year.”

Feeling a little like Joseph? Spend some time this Advent season with the restorative and contextual exploration (and exhortation) shared by Melissa Skelton in “Do Not Be Afraid: A Meditation on Matthew 1:18-25.” https://theotherjournal.com/2011/12/do-not-be-afraid-a-meditation-on-matthew-118-25/

In this meditation on Joseph's discovery of Mary's pregnancy, Melissa Skelton urges us to embrace the voice of God speaking in the depths of our souls, and to not be afraid.

12/11/2024

Issue 38: Money has launched! “Whereas money has led its logic to the structuring of doctrinal thought, theology has offered its prestige and mystique to monetary exchange. So the question of Christianity’s relation to and treatment of money is complex, contested, and ongoing.” Join us in exploring these complex conversations: https://theotherjournal.com/

12/06/2024

From our Advent issue in the archives, Nathan A. Smith asks “What does it mean to be a people of waiting and how does one wait faithfully?”

“In this season of Advent, we recall the future and wait in hopeful longing for the fullness of Christ to be revealed. Still, one may ask, like the Thessalonians, what does it mean to be a people of waiting and how does one wait faithfully? [...] To answer this question and to avoid the pitfalls of thumb-twiddling, antagonism to creation care, and hypersensitivity to the assumed changes in the eschatological winds, I suggest the Eucharist….”

https://theotherjournal.com/2017/12/advent-future-waiting/…

Nathan A. Smith encourages Christians to identify themselves with the waiting that is commemorated during the season of Advent.

11/27/2024

Heading into a holiday weekend with some travel time, and looking for book recommendations? Or are you eager to share the recent read you enjoyed? Please join the conversation in the comments. To begin, here is a book review shared earlier this year from our Editor in Chief Zac Settle, one example of the writing and reviews in The Other Journal.

“...the subtitle is “Fifty Entries Against Despair,” and so it should be no surprise the text is such a joy to read. As a priest and editor who spends a lot of time reading theological writing, I find Wiman’s reflections on faith to be a breath of fresh air. He’s pushing himself and his readers to move beyond modes of faith that simply drive toward understanding and answer, as though we can ever arrive at some single, authoritative understanding of ourselves, God, or the mystery of the world itself.”

Take a look at The Other Journal archives for relevant content that explores questions of our time in poems, reviews, and creative art. theotherjournal.com

11/13/2024

"They are the whole congregation
suspended, still, holding their breaths,
bathed in light of the noon-time sun,
their shadows under their feet

forever. Maybe forever.
They look to their brethren, in white,
and the preacher in the river,
waiting on the Holy Ghost."

"Take Me to the Water," Blake Leland's poem from our latest issue on Church, dives into a moment of sacrament captured on film. Read the whole piece on our website: https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/take-me-to-the-water/

from the collection of Jim Linderman It is a book of photographs, postal cards some of them, of people gathered at a river to witness and to be baptized. In this one, nothing at the horizon rises higher than the dark, open umbrellas, like little clouds, some ladies hold against the sun. At least a [...

11/04/2024

“It is my hope that Christians today, especially those of us who want our holy book to influence the creation of American laws, will commit to a revolution of values by reading the Bible with intelligence and compassion. Like Ambrose, may we understand and interpret Scripture in such a way that we see all people as children of God who are worthy of the right to live with respect and freedom. Like Thurman, may we come to experience Jesus as a first-century Palestinian Jewish carpenter who led a movement to free himself and others from hunger, sickness, and other forms of oppression. Let those of us who are inspired by the Bible and the history of the Black church ensure that laws and policies are created, passed, enforced, and executed with the love and compassion that God demonstrates for all of creation from Genesis to the Revelation.”

Historian and professor Tejai Beulah explores the theology of Howard Thurman and the influence of his grandmother, a former slave, scholarship that encourages intelligent action, transformation of societies, and liberation in heaven and on earth. Read more in our archives: https://theotherjournal.com/2021/12/interpret-scripture-intelligently-civil-rights-human-dignity/

Tejai Beulah explores US Christianity from the perspective of a formerly enslaved grandmother.

10/31/2024

Grin and laugh through this surprising and amusing poem, written by Rebecca D. Martin and inspired by Ross Gay, published in our Issue 37: "The Second Time I Laughed during Holy Communion"

after Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy the whole right half of the sanctuary the people sliding their hands along the hard smooth polished backs of pews couldn’t figure out how to shuffle down the aisle at the right time one section lining up all the way to the door the other side forgetting to join them...

10/25/2024

“Just as the nested reality of a game is constantly affected by the real of the players and the world external to it, so too are we lost in our own imaginary-symbolic reality in which we are constantly being affected and moved by the real beyond us while also being unable to fully symbolize it. Games, thus, give us a chance to straddle two realities, inviting us to do the same with our material lives.” Read more by Paul Hoard in“On Pleasure and Games” from our latest issue.
https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/on-pleasure-and-games/

Over the past couple of decades, the board game industry has exploded. Game-related stores, cafes, bars, and conventions have been popping up all over the world, and the game industry produced about $18 billion in revenue for 2022, a number that is expected to steadily rise.[1] Although this growth....

10/23/2024

What is The Other Journal? Our common commitment is to being a progressive, constructive, and charitable Christian voice that resources readers to love God, love neighbor, and invest in the hope that our world would be further characterized by justice and peace. Our next issue is focused on Money and will include writing in a variety of genres from essays to book reviews, poetry, interviews, and original art. Our goal is to provide readers with provocative and challenging, and nuanced Christian writing on social issues, politics, and theological ideas. Learn more about the journal:

https://theotherjournal.com/about/

10/18/2024

“I can’t stop seeing Zebulon on the steeply, hearing his call singe the sky.
I can’t stop knowing my own ancestors enslaved him.”

Poet Nancy L. Meyer wrestles with the past and its consequences through imagination and historical record woven into this creative piece featured in Issue 37 on Church. Read the whole poem here: https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/zebulon-on-the-steeple/

10/15/2024

John Schweiker Shelton evaluates the history and impact of parachurch organizations, the need for church campus ministries, and analysis from the recent book The Great Dechurching alongside the context of American Christian missionaries. Read more from our latest Issue 37: Church in "Praying Towns, Parachurch Ministries, and the Need for Sodality" https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/praying-towns-parachurch-ministries-and-the-need-for-sodality/

10/11/2024

Join us in telling it slant–and receive access to our current issue and twenty years of archives. Join us in envisioning a future of empathy, hope, and justice. We will publish two more issues in 2024 –don't miss out! https://theotherjournal.com/subscribe/

10/08/2024

“Borne by United Methodist–meets–Roman Catholic waters and fire, I’ve done church with tea-with-oat-milk Protestants and preachers of the prosperity gospel, evangelicals and charismatics, conservative Episcopalians and the Anglicans. I’ve prayed the prayer, prayed it with others, been sprinkled, been dunked, been disgraced. Married and divorced, I have loved and lost, and the poet’s mostly right on that.

Guy can’t hold a religion job, you might think, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

But I’ll see your smarty-snarky, Seinfeldian take and raise you a Defoe, Chesterton, and Eliot—Daniel Defoe, whose shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe faces death more than twice before seeing his plan isn’t working; G. K. Chesterton, who describes how we ‘walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place’; and T. S. Eliot, who finds that our explorations end when we ‘arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’[1]

Sometimes the shortest possible distance between two points isn’t a straight line.”

Read more of this intense, playful, and introspective “Orthodoxical” essay by Paul Hughes from our recent issue on Church: https://theotherjournal.com/2024/08/orthodoxical/

10/05/2024

Enter into the weekend through portals of poetry and join David Milley's journey in this Homily published in our Issue 37: Church. Read the whole poem here and understand how "I never learned to love my father's God, Instead": https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/homily/

10/01/2024

On October 17 in Denver, explore new perspectives around purity, contamination, and disgust while enjoying a delicious dinner created by local chefs and craft brewers. Engage in thought-provoking discussions and embodied learning with theologians, licensed therapists, and culinarians. Don’t miss this transformative event that includes a subscription to The Other Journal!

Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tbc-pre-game-event-sacred-contamination-w-dan-koch-the-seattle-school-tickets-939698001017

Join Us for a Pre-Conference Event at Theology Beer Camp 2024! Sacred Contamination: Embracing the Messy Call of Christian Love

09/27/2024

"I am sometimes asked how serving as a deacon in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church shapes the way I read and write and teach theology. The truth is that I cosset a general allergy to the question. Answers to it often decline into styles, and each of these styles court reduction. One style reduces theology to ministry, which of course makes nonsense of the vast majority of theological discourse. Consoling a bereaved mother is, for example, entirely wide of the essence-energy distinction’s remit. Another style reverses the reduction, as if chanting the stichera during vespers might resolve the question of being’s univocity. But again: why imagine that ministry can only mean theologically? How exactly to think my way out of these twin reductions is not always clear to me. And so I habitually avoid the question of ministry’s relation to theology rather than risk reducing one to the other.

Even so, I am now prepared to confess that ministry as a deacon has indeed shaped the way I read and write and teach theology. But what diaconal ministry has taught me arrived as a surprise. [...] One among these movements carved deepest: retrogradation."

Explore "Theology in Retrograde" with Justin Coyle in our latest issue.



https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/theology-in-retrograde/

09/27/2024

"I am sometimes asked how serving as a deacon in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church shapes the way I read and write and teach theology. The truth is that I cosset a general allergy to the question. Answers to it often decline into styles, and each of these styles court reduction. One style reduces theology to ministry, which of course makes nonsense of the vast majority of theological discourse. Consoling a bereaved mother is, for example, entirely wide of the essence-energy distinction’s remit. Another style reverses the reduction, as if chanting the stichera during vespers might resolve the question of being’s univocity. But again: why imagine that ministry can only mean theologically? How exactly to think my way out of these twin reductions is not always clear to me. And so I habitually avoid the question of ministry’s relation to theology rather than risk reducing one to the other.

Even so, I am now prepared to confess that ministry as a deacon has indeed shaped the way I read and write and teach theology. But what diaconal ministry has taught me arrived as a surprise. [...] One among these movements carved deepest: retrogradation."

Explore "Theology in Retrograde" with Justin Coyle in our latest issue.
https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/theology-in-retrograde/

09/25/2024

On Tuesday, submissions close for Issue 39: Death. Read more on our website about what we're looking for, and send your essays, creative writing, art and reviews by Tuesday, October 1. Thank you for sharing your work with us! https://theotherjournal.com/submissions/