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“People always leaving just as other folks arrive.” That is the line that suddenly came to mind when I learned that Father Matthew Kelty left this world peacefully at noon on Friday last. This is a great loss to those of us newly, and not-so-newly, arrived, and I wanted to try to explain why I think this is so. This remarkable monk spent fifty off-and-on years at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where he was the last confessor that Thomas Merton ever had; and if that wasn’t enough to warrant further discussion, he was also a gay priest who came out in one of his most eloquent essays at the ripe old age of ninety. We will not soon see the likes of such monks again.

American Christians assume that what prophecy does is predict specific events to happen. And of course that’s the way the Book of Revelation has been read. They read it, as you say, as predicting this means this, or the beast is this. But prophesy, as we know, is a highly interpretative art, and the way this book lives and has lived for two thousand years is by interpretation and reinterpretation.

“Neither hunger nor HIV can be curbed or ended by the church, but neither can these goals be accomplished without the help of the church and other faith communities. Governments alone have the resources to deal with the tremendous needs of feeding the hungry and caring for the sick. However, the church can help serve as the conscience of a country—prompting policies that are more compassionate and generous to the poor. Faith communities need to model what it means to be non-stigmatizing and what it means to share from its resources. Christians that do not reach out to the poor, the hungry, and the sick jeopardize their own souls.”

At the end of 2011, in a sign of what’s to come, the U.S. Bishops warned the Obama administration to amend a regulation on contraception in its health care legislation or stand accused of religious discrimination.

I’m not an unbeliever. No way. My theology is fuzzy, a bit of a smorgasbord—Emerson and Tolstoy and Jesus and Augustine. I would be happily worshipping with Quakers if I could find any; the “inner light” makes so much sense to me. The truth is, I respect faith. I love the sacrificial love God inspires in human beings. I worship the Creator of an amazingly beautiful, diverse, and exciting planet. It’s obvious the hand of God is everywhere and always has been. Is that enough common ground for peace between us? Don’t answer. I’m afraid it’s not.

The vision of justice and political progress that reigns in American culture and progressive religious circles is one of restoring the individual’s dignity, which imagines the individual—even as a member of a community—as somehow whole. This vision of wholeness, however, often has to function differentially: for my wholeness to be meaningful, then someone somewhere, if only imaginatively and fantastically, has to be understood as lacking wholeness, as needing restoration.

Anybody who sets himself the task of acquitting God from the charge of being a “moral monster” has his work cut out for him. Paul Copan knows this, but in his attempt to acquit God he seems to be standing at the bottom of a pit wielding a shovel. How do you get out of a hole with that tool?

The prophetic tradition of black Christianity remains alive, if embattled. It is impossible to conceive of the civil rights movement without placing black Christianity at its center, for it empowered the rank and file who made the movement move. And when it moved, it was able to demolish the system of legal segregation. The history of black Christianity in America made that transformation possible, even as it frustrated some of the deeper-rooted aims of some activists who sought to address issues of income and wealth inequality as much as the formal legal structures of “civil rights.” That remains the prophetic task of the generation misleadingly labeled as “post-racial.”

This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old (or departed). And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand. Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.

Mark D. Jordan’s recent RD op-ed garnered a response from Peter Steinfels, whose final New York Times column was referenced in the article. Here are both Steinfels’ letter, and Jordan’s response.