The Pastor's Currency is Influence by Lee Eclov
The Holy Spirit has an uncanny way of using the smallest things to leave a lasting impression. Younger pastors just have to take it on faith that they’re doing and saying things—mostly very ordinary things—that matter more than they’ll ever know.
Now That I'm Called-Women and the Call to Ministry by Jill Firth
A personal sense of call is to be tested by Scripture, our gifts, our own personal history and the wisdom of our church’s community. A strength of Now That I'm Called is its applicability within different church traditions, whether our tradition allows women to teach men, or limits our role to preaching and teaching to women or children.
He Threw It All Away by Robert George
In the early 1970s, Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus was poised to become the nation’s next great liberal public intellectual—the Reinhold Niebuhr of his generation. He had going for him everything he needed to be not merely accepted but lionized by the liberal establishment. First, of course, there were his natural gifts as a thinker, writer, and speaker. Then there was a set of left-liberal credentials that were second to none. He had been an outspoken and prominent civil rights campaigner, indeed, someone who had marched literally arm-in-arm with his friend Martin Luther King. He had founded one of the most visible anti-Vietnam war organizations. He moved easily in elite circles and was regarded by everyone as a “right-thinking” (i.e., left-thinking) intellectual-activist operating within the world of mainline Protestant religion. Then something happened: Abortion.
Thomas Merton, the Monk Who Became a Prophet by Alan Jacobs
Merton was a remarkable man by any measure, but perhaps the most remarkable of his traits was his hypersensitivity to social movements from which, by virtue of his monastic calling, he was supposed to be removed. Intrinsic to Merton’s nature was a propensity for being in the midst of things. If he had continued to live in the world, he might have died not by electrocution but by overstimulation.
