Remembering God’s providence

As Texas sends thousands of migrants to cities around the country, a border ministry leader in El Paso shares how churches elsewhere can be prepared to receive asylum seekers.

Can you find rest in worship if worship is your work? A conference in Nashville c hallenges music ministers to retreat into the stillness, silence, and peace of liturgy.

The head of the Evangelical Fellowship of India pays tribute to Brother Andrew, who inspired him to take risks for the sake of the gospel since “every place outside the will of God is dangerous.”

From the CT archives: Remembering God’s providence as we grapple with natural disasters.

Holding onto trauma has physical, emotional, and spiritual implications, counselor Sheila Wise Roe explains on the Viral Jesus podcast.

covenantchurchsd 10.2.22

North Park Presbyterian Church 10.02.2022

An open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom

The following is an open letter from Pastor John MacArthur to Governor Gavin Newsom, in response to billboard advertisements placed across the country by Newsom’s campaign misquoting Mark 12:31 in support of abortion. View a PDF version of the letter.

ACNA leaders’ inaction on sexual abuse allegations

Religious ‘switching’ patterns will help determine Christianity’s course in U.S.
Pew Research Center: Whether the U.S. will continue to have a Christian majority in 2070 will depend on many factors, including one that was a key focus of the Center’s new study: religious “switching” – that is, voluntary changes in religious affiliation.

Churches defend clergy loophole in child sex abuse reporting
Associated Press: In 33 states, clergy are exempt from any laws requiring professionals such as teachers, physicians and psychotherapists to report information about alleged child sexual abuse to police or child welfare officials if the church deems the information privileged.

Third-party report details ACNA leaders’ inaction on sexual abuse allegations
Religion News Service: Released online late Tuesday, the report follows a monthslong investigation that was contentious from the start.

Don’t leave migrant ministry to the border
Christianity Today: What the surge of asylum seekers is like on the ground and how the church all over the country can help.

Evangelicalism thrived because it enabled white Christians to avoid civil rights movements according to new book
Religion Dispatches: Historian David Hollinger argues that evangelical churches grew during and after the 1960s precisely because they offered a less demanding alternative to the social justice and civil rights commitments of the liberal mainline.

Christ United Presbyterian San Diego 10/2/22

Maranatha Ethiopian Christian Fellowship San Diego 10.02.2022

St. Edmund Arrowsmith, martyred for celebrating the Mass

The enduring legacy of St. Edmund Arrowsmith, martyred for celebrating the Mass

The hand of St. Edmund Arrowsmith has pride of place in the Church of St. Edmund and St. Oswald in Ashton-in-Makerfield, a former mining town midway between Liverpool and Manchester.

More than ‘the nuts and bolts’: World’s newest bishops talk synodality in Rome

The world’s newest bishops gathered in Rome last month to learn more about what it means to be a Catholic bishop

8 quotes from saints on guardian angels

On Oct. 2, the Catholic Church celebrates the memorial of the guardian angels.

Making friends as an adult

Social studies

I was recently chatting with a colleague whose son just started ninth grade at a new school. He had a tight group of pals in elementary and middle school. Now, at 14, he was starting over, the new kid trying to make new friends.

My colleague described how she’d been coaching her son through the uncomfortable process of finding his people, telling him it takes time, that it might be uncomfortable for a while.

We agreed that this particular discomfort isn’t limited to adolescence. “Every time a shift happens, you have to relearn,” she said. That shift could be starting a new job, moving to a new city, returning to in-person work, acclimating to life after a divorce.

As children, we have school and, if we’re lucky, some combination of parent-negotiated play dates, sports teams and after-school activities that create favorable conditions for making friends. The indignities of finding a new group with whom to eat lunch notwithstanding, your environment is tailored to the cultivation of new ties.

But once we leave formal schooling, we don’t find ourselves in cohorts or situations like these as frequently. The advice for adults wishing to make friends is often to join a club, to find a group of people who are into what you’re into. We have to seek out the grown-up equivalent of a sandbox, a place where people are oriented toward making connections.

Finding the running club or knitting circle is the administrative part of friendmaking. The greater challenge is moving through the awkwardness and fears of rejection that we may have thought we left in the high school cafeteria. Marisa Franco, a psychologist and the author of “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends,” recently spoke with The Times about strategies for getting over such anxieties. She mentioned a few theories about the dynamics of meeting new people that I found especially intriguing.

The liking gap: We tend to underestimate others’ esteem. “When strangers interact, they’re usually more liked by the other person than they assume,” Dr. Franco said.

The acceptance prophecy: “When people assume others like them, they tend to become warmer and friendlier,” she said. And that leads others to respond warmly in turn.

The theory of inferred attraction: People tend to like people who they think like them. “So the more you can show people that you like and value them, the better,” Dr. Franco said.

Have you found yourself in a situation where you were trying to make new friends as an adult? How did it go? Tell me about it.

For more

• Why is it hard to make friends when you’re over 30?
• “Even if our relationship-building muscles have atrophied, with a bit of work they’ll regain their strength.” Brad Stulberg on pandemic-era socializing.
• One potential benefit of returning to in-person work: office friends.
• On using a relationship app to make platonic friends.

 

Stand Strong in the Spirit