Room At The Table

The church is not exempt from cultural divisions, and battle lines are drawn today over issues related to culture and worship. This collection of articles by faculty members at Princeton explore the multicultural challenges facing the contemporary church about worship and include discussions of cultural perspectives, liturgical elements, youth and worship, and theological fidelity amidst differing cultural traditions.

A cry that touches our hearts and awakens our desire to help--in some way--the hundreds of thousands of children around the world who are at risk. Overwhelmed by poverty, war, hunger, and separation from family, they are not allowed to be children. They carry guns, they sell themselves to buy food, they live on the streets.
Donald Dunson tells the stories of our children from New Orleans to the Sudan. Each chapter profiles three or four individuals as it probes an issue affecting the worlds children including hunger and poverty, war and sexual exploitation, homelessness and the need for love.
No Room At the Table concludes with a list of resources for involvement and action. It is an eye--and heart--opening work.

"That is when Holly really noticed his eyes for the very first time. How two eyes could hold so much of a story, she would never understand. It was as if in Joshua's brown eyes, there had been a window into his very world. Except this world seemed far too sad to enter... This world didn't contain sunshine and spring flowers. It didn't contain warm chocolate chip cookies and cool swims in the summer. It seemed... if she stayed lost in his eyes for too long that they may tell a story that she wasn't yet prepared to know." In Room at the Table, journey with the Watson family as they discover how hope can overcome heartache and love really can change the world!

Daddy, Can You Bring Me the Moon? is Justin Vaughn's debut picture book. It features the lovely illustrations of Breanna Matthews. Justin is a husband, father, and an early childhood educator. He published his first book, Room at the Table, in 2020. Breanna is traditionally trained in oil painting, and she has worked in many other mediums such as paper cutting, graphic design, watercolor, and digital illustrations. From the author: "One of my favorite aspects of being an author is the ability to capture a feeling in a story and to make it relatable to others. In my new picture book, I sought to capture the loving relationship between a father and his daughter. The innocent wonder of the daughter and the unconditional love of the father, during their interactions on an evening stroll on the beach, will surely connect to many who read this book. I hope it will become a great bedtime story for fathers and daughters to share together for years to come."

Love does not begin with condemnation. Can an evangelical theologian and his gay son overcome the differences in belief that threaten to destroy their relationship? For Brad and Drew Harper, that question wasn't theoretical and neither was the resounding yes they found after years of struggle. Writing to each other with compassion, grit, and humor, Brad and Drew take us on their journey as parent and child from the churches of Middle America to the penthouses of New York's party scenes, through a pastor's-kid childhood and painful conversion therapy to the hard-won victories of their adult relationship. But Space at the Table is more than just a memoir. It is a guide, showing us a way through the roadblocks that threaten to devastate both families and the broader evangelical and LBGTQ communities. Speaking from their own experience, Brad and Drew offer an invitation to join them at a place where love is stronger than the beliefs that divide us.

This is a story of how a small group of people made a transformation from Jew to Jewish American to American Jews. It is not unlike the transformation and Americanization of other peoples. How it differs is from the very fact that a religion, a set of beliefs transformed into a nationality. It is about a period of time in one woman's life, my mother who was a blend of Europe and America. She was a mixture of ethnicity, culture, religion and Americanized traditions; a potpourri of ideas and actions unlike most and yet common to us all. This is also my story as well as hers. It is about our lives and times of changes. It is about the games we played, the education we received, the changes in religious practices, the friends we had, and the environments in which we lived. My mother possessed virtues that were stark realities of everyday life. It was that there was always room at her table and there never was a shortage of food. She was a powerful loving matriarch who touched the lives of a great many people with a "touch" of this (knowledge), and a "touch" of that, (love).

Sandhya Jha, an ordained minister and co-moderator of the Anti-Racism Commission of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), discusses the multicultural history that makes up the Disciples of Christ. Through research and interviews with people from various racial backgrounds, Room at the Table engages the reader through the 200 years of multicultural Disciples history.