I don’t know the answer to this question, but I’m sure it depends on whom you ask and what that person’s definition of a prophet is. My favorite formulation comes from scholar Ellen Davis. She sets aside definitions that focus on foretelling the future or simply speaking truth to power (citing Century contributing editor Walter Brueggemann’s observation that postmodernity has complicated our sense of both truth and power) and introduces the notion of the prophetic interpreter. In the Bible, she says, these were figures who “interpreted the faith for their time, and they interpreted the times for the faithful.”
It is in this sense that I find our magazine’s work to be prophetic. Our writers and editors offer interpretations of events in our lifetimes—things like Sinéad O’Connor’s activism or England’s public grieving of the Queen’s death—for people of faith. They also explore the stuff of religion, such as the confounding nature of coincidence or the economy of ancient Bethlehem, for those living in our particular times.
Our video of the week, featuring pastor Clint Schnekloth, is a thoughtful chat about religious trauma: what it is and how faith communities might attend to it, especially for LGBTQ congregants. (Clint recently reviewed Brooke Petersen’s Religious Trauma: Queer Stories in Estrangement and Return.)
Email me: What is a prophet, to you? Who is a prophet in today’s world?
“It would be many years before the world had to reckon with how right Sinéad O’Connor was to call attention to John Paul II’s complicity in the abuse of thousands of children. In the film, O’Connor says that she was determined to honor the contract she made with the Holy Spirit.”
“You only have to visit Bethlehem once for the notion of the inhospitable innkeeper to be deconstructed. Tea vendors like Sami, restaurateurs like Fadi, taxi drivers, and a bevy of shopkeepers along Star Street beckon visitors to come and see.”
“Our minds get suspicious when no one is in control of our every circumstance. That chance and coincidence could be part of the fabric of the universe—and one of the by-products of human freedom—is simply incomprehensible to many.”
”What would it mean for us to acknowledge such unfathomable loss with a public ritual of mourning? Not the hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing of biblical lament nor the righteous rage of protest, but a well-ordered performance of communal grief?”
by the editors
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