be.encouraged

be encouraged by stories from around the world

Sayings Of Dorothy Day

11 DOROTHY DAY QUOTES IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE RADICAL, PACIFIST SERVANT OF GOD BY THE WEB EDITORS Dorothy Day held many titles over the course of her life: social activist, journalist, Catholic convert, mother, political radical, pacifist, servant of God … the list goes on. Day embodied what it meant to put faith into action for […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

The Peace-making Pentecostal

What Scott Morrison might learn from Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia STEPHEN FOGARTY | OCTOBER 15TH, 2019 05:08 PM |  1 Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, was over the weekend awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Since taking office in April 2018, Ahmed has been instrumental in ending the 20-year territorial dispute with […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

The Gentleness Of Jean Vanier

Stanley Hauerwas  EDITOR’S NOTE: Jean Vanier, the founder of the international L’Arche movement, died this week, on 7 May 2019. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas is a long-time friend of Vanier, and the two of them collaborated on a book titled Living Gently in a Violent World. Both Vanier and Hauerwas participated in a 2010 episode of Encounter, during which Vanier […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

MLK 50 years on: They killed the dreamer but they could not kill the dream

Trevor L Jordan, PhD. To this day, it remains a mystery to me how the words and actions of an African American Baptist preacher from the Southern states of the USA could influence a young, white teenager from suburban Brisbane. The streets of Graceville in the 60s were not exactly seething with radicalism and dissent. […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

Learning Costly Resistance From Dietrich Bonhoeffer

CHRISTIAN CENTURY – Cheap resistance is like cheap grace. It risks very little… In Maria Schrader’s 2016 biopic, Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig argues that “every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition.” This is a useful bar to set for ourselves. Do our gestures of […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

Living Life Well – Allan Halladay

When I think of how I can live my life well, I reflect on the life of my good friend, elder and mentor, Allan Halladay. Allan’s Story Allan Halladay was born on May 28th 1937 in Nipawin, a small rural town in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada. Allan said: ‘Like most small towns there was a co-op […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

Together For The Common Good

A reflection on working for the Common Good by some British friends … For some years now, Together for the Common Good, along with other advocates of the common good, has been signalling that the current (social) settlement is no longer fit for purpose. In the past couple of years we’ve seen a decline of […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

Why I Left Westboro Baptist Church

Why I Left Westboro Baptist Church (TED TALK) What’s it like to grow up within a group of people who exult in demonizing … everyone else? Megan Phelps-Roper shares details of life inside America’s most controversial church and describes how conversations on Twitter were key to her decision to leave it. In this extraordinary talk, she […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

Houses Of Worship To Serve As Trump-Era Immigrant Sanctuaries

LAURIE GOODSTEIN NEW YORK TIMES – Protecting immigrants is shaping up to be a priority of the religious left, an amorphous collection of people and groups reflecting many faiths and ethnicities. It has been jolted into action by Mr. Trump’s victory and his selection of an attorney general nominee who supports a crackdown on immigrants… […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

The Sacred Fragility of Life: Tim Winton, Faith and Fundamentalism

Simon Smart I once had a fight with my wife over a Tim Winton book. Well, not really a fight, but let’s say, a spirited disagreement. We had both just finished reading Breath and she was more than a little annoyed at her erstwhile literary hero Winton, for what she perceived to be his overly […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

Sister Maria and Imam Moussa

Sister Maria is an 80-year-old Italian nun who arrived in the DRC in 1959, one year before its independence. Since 1984, she has worked as a midwife in Zongo at the hospital, which is run by the Congregation of the daughters of Saint-Joseph of Genoni from Italy. Sister Maria moves around the hospital as if […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »

My Emancipation From American Christianity

John Pavlovitz, Pastor and Writer, Updated: 08/12/2015 09:59 I used to think that it was just me, that it was my problem, my deficiency, my moral defect. It had to be. All those times when I felt like an outsider in this American Jesus thing; the ever-more frequent moments when my throat constricted and my heart raced […]

Read the rest of this entry » Read the rest of this entry »