Walter Brueggemann believed the future was unwritten. The biblical scholar and theologian, who died on June 5 at the age of 92, spent his remarkably prolific career urging Christians to think beyond what is and imagine what could be. That possibility, he believed, was grounded in the hope of a God who desires justice for the marginalized. Brueggemann had a humble spirit, an academic mind, and a poetic soul — but don’t be fooled: He was, above all, a radical

Walking down a road paved with churches, I approach a large building whose bright orange awning beckons me from down the block. The establishment, Sea Town Fish & Meat Market, is staffed by neighborly workers who call me bebecita when I ask them to weigh my tilapia and salmon. I am there on yet another Friday morning to pick up fresh fish for one of my Lenten devotions: eating fish on Fridays.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday backed a bid by an arm of a Catholic diocese in Wisconsin for a religious exemption from the state's unemployment insurance tax in the latest ruling in which the justices took an expansive view of religious rights.

Isaac Villegas' evocative book opens in the Southwest desert along the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico as a group of people leave crosses in the places where migrants have lost their lives. These crosses, writes Villegas, are “...an act of devotion to a stranger who should have been our neighbor… Each crucifix remembers a life lost to the violence of immigration policies.

In her personal mission statement, Matthews says she strives “to amplify the voices of the unheard, to shed light on the unseen, and to be a steadfast reminder that hope, and love are the truest pathways to equity and justice." Influenced by Bernice Johnson Reagon, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Melissa Etheridge, Ani DiFranco, and, of course, Tracy Chapman, to whom she has often been compared, Matthews brings her whole self into her work.