Good News for a Fractured World: Weekly Summary
Sunday
For spiritually alive people, for people of deep and genuine faith, we don’t want to surrender to despair and cynicism, reactivity and fragmentation. We want to be healed and empowered, so we can participate in healing and empowering other people.
—Brian McLaren
Monday
Throughout the 2026 Daily Meditations, we will be looking at the Bible in new and fresh ways—as good news for a fractured world.
—Brian McLaren
Tuesday
We cannot create epiphanies, but, like the Wise Men, we can respond to them. Epiphanies grab a hold of us; we can’t shake them. Epiphanies beckon. The star invites; it calls to the attentive to do something—to act.
—Diana Butler Bass
Wednesday
This marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is for the sake of divine transformation (theosis), not intellectual or “small-self” coziness or even righteousness. The biblical revelation invites us into a genuinely new experience.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
If we center narratives of liberation and survival, refusing to sanitize Jesus and refusing to spiritualize physical freedom, we get closer to what can actually be called gospel—good news.
—Whitney Wilkinson Arreche
Friday
Jesus is asking us, “Are we content to settle for the temporary thirst quenchers of life: the things on which this society places so much value, things that will never slake the thirst of your parched, dry souls? Or do you thirst for righteousness, for peace, for justice, for the liberation of all God’s people?”
—Barbara Harris
Week One Practice
The Good News from a Back Pew Prophet
In Jesus’s inaugural address in the synagogue, he reads a passage from the prophet Isaiah (61:1–2): “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18). Inspired by this passage, poet and CAC staff member Drew Jackson offers this commentary from the “back pew”:
Their good news ain’t never been heard like that around here. What’s good for them sounds like hell in my ear. You hear them cheerin? Four more years of their man. You know what that means for us? Nothin changin. Same ol same ol. Domination. Brutality. Low salary. We know what they mean when they say law and order. I heard that man Tutu said that good news to a hungry person is bread. What about if I’m just straight broke? I need that bread. And then preacher man gonna stand up here and tell us to wait until the sweet by and by. That’s what he says all the time. I’m tired of this. We need something different. But different ain’t never gonna come as long as we live under them. With their foot on our necks. I don’t even know why I keep coming. I mean, I guess it’s good to show face in this small town, but I’m not buyin what they’re sellin. If I’m honest, though, I think I’m still hoping to snatch some kind of good news up in this place. That’s why I sit here in the back. Only news they’ve got for me out there is some garbage about some bootstraps. Truth is, if it ain’t good for us, it ain’t good for no one. I need to hear some news that’s good from the bottom up.
Reference:
Taken from God Speaks Through Wombs by Drew Jackson. Copyright © 2021 by Drew Edward Jackson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. Page 59.
Image credit and inspiration: Paul Macallan, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like this bright flower, the gift of contemplation and action brings us hope in the midst of painful reality.
