We’re all speculating here, I guess, with the understanding that the speculation is itself a process of hope: what do we long for? what outcomes can we imagine and, through that imagining, help enact?
Debra RienstraJanuary 4, 2023
Our brains are altered by swimming in digital media, its allures and distractions. And our lives of continuous partial attention make deep concentration more difficult. We can still do it, but it’s harder.
Debra RienstraSeptember 3, 2022
And so we pray. Or try to. Our prayers—well, mine anyway—seem awfully puny against the grand machinations of world events. Actually, my prayers also seem puny and ineffective against the small machinations of my own personal troubles. So I keep thinking about that line in…
Debra RienstraMarch 5, 2022
My faith these days sometimes feels as thin and dry as that little wafer. So the presence of these familiar, faithful people—even if we can’t chat over coffee after the service—that presence feels like a balm. This whole pandemic disaster has taught me—probably many of…
Debra RienstraFebruary 5, 2022
Anyway, our team has heard that you young people are getting really discouraged about, you know, everything. So we decided to reach out and have a little chat.
Debra RienstraNovember 20, 2021
It’s heartbreaking to see the once-beautiful churches in these photographs encrusted with mold and junk and falling apart. Plaster crumbles from sanctuary ceilings, organs molder, pews gather coatings of dirt and dust, stairwells collapse into piles of beautifully carved, jumbled pieces.
Debra RienstraJune 5, 2021
For UK Christian leaders, the challenges are fraught and puzzling: how to steward property, how to do church in a changing cultural context. The heavy questions of how many will remain faithful, and what faithfulness now means.
Debra RienstraJune 4, 2021
What does it mean, I wonder, to encounter a burning bush, flaming but not consumed, and hear nothing? Beauty manifests God, but what if God does not call your name out of the flames? Only silence. No appointment with destiny. You admire for a moment…
Debra RienstraOctober 31, 2020
People were doing this. Churches were organizing community gardens and small farms, trying to combine faith practice, community, discipleship, health, justice. Healing land and community at once, reconnecting faith to place.
Debra RienstraSeptember 19, 2020
