Isaiah asks us to "maintain justice" by doing "what is right." Think of an instance when you had to make a difficult choice in order to do what was right. Where did you find the strength?

Religion spends a lot of time defining boundaries: who belongs and who doesn't, who conforms and who doesn't, who is like us and who isn't. But another major piece of the business of religion is journeying across limits and encountering the outsider.

There’s never been a good time to be an outsider. Social systems are designed to benefit members, and the welfare of outlying parties is not a consideration—normally, that is. Good governments make pacts with their citizens, clubs offer membership privileges, and most religions worth their salt promise salvation of some kind to constituents.

When we learned that our soon-to-be-born daughter had Down syndrome, people sent links to articles meant to reassure my husband and me that all would be well. "Welcome to Holland" was sent to us many times over.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it is often mothers in need who are driven to be inventive for the sake of their children. Such was the story of Sephali Begum, a 26-year-old single mother from Bangladesh who, in concern for the future of her daughter, took the desperate step of offering to sell one of her own eyes.

My father told me the story about his being an immigrant teenager desperately looking for work on the East Coast with his two brothers. Employment office after employment office had signs that said "Italians need not apply" or "No Italians wanted."

Divisions between people of different heritages in the Middle East, so painfully evident in Jesus' encounter with the Canaanite woman, are still with us some 2,000 years later. But a new song aims to heal that division.

We pray for the God's mercy for our sins.

For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? Paul, as usual in Romans, has his feet both in his native Judaism and in his new faith.

That is our vocation: to convert . . . the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.  --Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996)