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Rescuing Christ from the Christian church?

 

Recently columnist Elizabeth Farrelly wrote an article calling for a project to “Rescue Christ from the Christian church.” Her call was a plea for people not to give up on spirituality because of the heinous crimes of the Church and simultaneously a scathing critique on the Western Church because it has lost its way. This fall of the Church, she believes, is evidenced by the church’s lust for power. In my view, Farrelly’s point is not so much that the Church itself is a failure, even though Farrelly chastises it, but rather that the Church has become compromised in the most profound way because of its hierarchical structures, patriarchy and entrenched institutionalism. Farrelly writes Continue reading Rescuing Christ from the Christian church?

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The invisible older woman

My work has led me to interact and become friends with an 81 year old woman in my community.

For a project our team is working on, we had to take a photo of my new friend. The photograph was professional, well-shot and stylistically near perfect, but I knew she would hate it.

In the photo my friend is sitting on a patterned sofa, not smiling or looking at the camera. The background shows the hundreds of paintings and trinkets she has on her walls which add to the comfortable congestion, clutter and quirkiness of her home. However, in the photo she seems to blend into those walls and become inanimate, even a non-person perhaps. She doesn’t stand out but rather grafts onto the detail of the wallpaper. Ironically, she is invisible in that photo. Continue reading The invisible older woman