Description: Hope Church--its clergy and its people--are quite a congregation, an unforgettable cast of saints and sinners. While serving a heavenly realm, they also have their feet plainly planted in the muck and mire of the real world. Here is an Easter story of ordinary folk caught in the gracious grasp of an extraordinary God. In this rollicking, hilarious, sometimes pathetic, fast-paced, and always entertaining journey through a month of Sundays at Hope Church, we meet a wild cast of characters in church people surprised to be the body of Christ. Sex, violence, greed, grunge, lust, and...

With I'm Not from Here, popular writer Will Willimon returns to fiction with a story of spiritual discovery set in a Southern town. Will takes us on a Don Quixote-like journey during which young Felix Goforth Luckie learns a great deal about the world, about other people, and about a God who shows up in the oddest places, in the strangest times, and among the unlikeliest people. On a quest to discover himself, Felix is discovered by the grace of God. In homage to Dostoevsky, Cervantes, and the Bible, Willimon creates a world that is thoroughly believable, realistic, and ordinary, yet at the...

The gospel teaches that every human is sacred. Refugee children and Islamist terrorists. Police officers and young African Americans. Unborn babies, always, and also abortionists. Orange-haired casino owners, former First Ladies, progressive hipsters, prosperity-gospel televangelists, members of Congress, Confederate-flag-waving white nationalists? Sacred. This absurd claim is at the heart of the gospel. Each person is created in the image and likeness of God. Each is someone for whom Jesus died. And if this is true, we have much work to do. The writers in this issue may not agree on...