Liuan Huska (陈柳岸) is a freelance writer and speaker focusing on topics of embodiment and spirituality. Her writing, on everything from chronic pain to evangelical fertility trends, appears in Christianity Today, The Christian Century, In Touch Magazine, Hyphen, Sojourners, and Church Health Reader. She lives with her husband and their three little boys in the Chicago area. Liuan is a member of the A Rocha USA board of trustees.
As I scrolled through the Facebook updates from my friends in the area, I heaved a deep sigh of frustration and lament. Again!? How could a thousand-year rain event happen every other year? Something was amiss.
It’s not a word I used much previously, but ‘harrowing’ sums up the experience of the last weeks and months. To my mind it has connotations of deep emotional scarring and agonizing pain; perhaps because a harrow is a farming implement with metal blades, dragged across a field to break up and smooth out the soil.
Extinction Rebellion’ (XR) has been getting plenty of media coverage recently. It’s a new nonviolent, direct-action movement aiming to provoke discussion and transform the climate change agenda. In over 80 cities across 33 countries, XR has closed bridges and roads, protested outside fossil fuel companies, and seen hundreds of people arrested. When interviewed, most XR activists have spoken of their fear or eco-anxiety for the future, and their anger at the lack of action.
How do you feel about environmental problems? In the environmental movement and in natural sciences, people usually ask ‘What do you think?’, but we have reached a time when more attention should be given to emotional resilience, the ways in which we might survive psychologically in the midst of rapidly changing environmental conditions.
The grand drama of Easter took place as a three-day-event around the special Shabbat during Passover. Holy Saturday is the least remembered day of the Easter Mystery: after Good Friday and before Easter Sunday. Yet all of Jesus’ claims and actions regarding Sabbath point to this climactic place in time.
Can you imagine being a disciple that Saturday? The visual and the visceral impact of yesterday continue to be overwhelming. You recall stories that alluded to resurrection but your hope […]
Can you imagine being a disciple that Friday? In spite of all the allusions to death you had not understood what Jesus meant. Now He was on a cross, suffering […]
I was distracted from the documentary by the reactions of my two friends. Jack revelled in the power and skill of the predators, their mastery of timing and feather control, the elegance and efficiency with which they hunted. Jill was horrified by their bloodlust. How could such callous cruelty be part of God’s good creation?
Today’s Middle East is beset by tragedy: a litany of human suffering, migration and exile in a region of such beauty and cultural richness. Yet, the Middle East is also one of the great wildlife migration routes: millions of birds take this route to and fro each year. What insights can we gain from linking these two mass migrations, one human, sudden and involuntary, the other avian, regular and instinctive?
Louis Armstrong sang it; millions of us have hummed along: ‘What a wonderful world’. Sure, God made it good – Genesis tells us so repeatedly and finishes up by God declaring it all ‘very good’. However, if creation was created very good, what’s happened since? What about predation, disease, cruelty, viruses, volcanoes, disability, earthquakes?
