During a recent Sunday morning Bible study on the book of Ephesians, the conversation turned to the sustenance the people drew from the church's stained glass windows. Below is an expanded version of Don Cochran's thoughtful contribution to the conversation. Don Cochran writes: When I first started worshipping at Second, I was puzzled by the military figure in the circular window in the west transept. Who was he?   Why was he put in the window?   What meaning did he have for those who contracted Tiffany to create the window?   And what meaning does he have for us today? I soon leaned that this is a memorial window to remember the life of a young man from our congregation whose life was tragically taken from him in London during the 1918 pandemic. He died not on a battlefield in France during the war but in a London hospital unsuspectedly.   As I view the figure now, I cannot help but wonder what goals he had for his life, who he would have become had...

Nancy Quigley writes: In these times of noisy and chaotic protests about policing and the loss of Black lives, I attended a vigil at Peace UCC last week, in Webster Groves, and found it to be a good alternative to the protests, a way to be present and “say their names” without worrying about violence or virus.   Peace has been holding a Friday evening vigil for a couple of months.  The vigil, beginning at 6 p.m., is a half hour of silence opening with eight minutes and forty six seconds of kneeling or sitting or lying on the ground, in memory of George Floyd.  For the remainder of the half hour, also in silence, participants stand along the sidewalk in front of the church. Last week we held pictures of people who were killed by the police as their names were read out loud one by one. Cars and buses drove by, many people honking or giving a thumbs up sign. Each participant wore a mask and we stood six feet apart. It was a moving experience and for me, a good wa...

David Justice, a PhD student at. St. Louis University, whose work is centered on Martin Luther King Jr., reflects on a way he has found to cultivate a scholarly community during the pandemic.  One way that I've been staying connected during this pandemic has been a virtual writing group hosted through an organization called the Political Theology Network. Though the group got going prior to COVID widely spreading in America, it has turned into something that I look forward to each week (we meet Mondays and Fridays for two hours) as a way to stay connected to the world outside my apartment. The general routine is that the group members will chat for 15-20 minutes once everyone signs into Zoom, after which we all stay on the Zoom call until the end of the two hours, at which time we reconvene and share what we were able to accomplish during that time. "The goal is essentially to imitate the experience of meeting with a group of people at a coffee shop to do work. In a time w...

Tim Woodcock writes: With the recent death of Rep. John Lewis, my mind keeps on coming back to graphic novel series March that tells Lewis’s life story and unpacks his philosophy of agitating for civil rights and causing what he called “good trouble.” It is now on my nightstand, waiting to be reread. The March series, published between 2013 and 2016, was written as a collaboration between three people and i s dedicated “to the past and future children of the [civil rights] movement.” Interviews with Lewis were shaped into a complex narrative by Andrew Aydin (a staffer who worked with Lewis in Washington, D.C.) and Aydin’s script was turned into a graphic novel by Nate Powell. Reduced to a simple timeline, March follows Lewis from his childhood in rural Alabama via the civil rights protests in the 1960s to his ascendance to Congress in the 1980s and his presence at Barack Obama’s inauguration as president in 2008. But the story blurs time in some interesting ways. For instanc...