Carol Howard Merritt is the latest speaker to join the NCLI lineup!

Posted on 04. Feb, 2013 by CPR Team in Updates

We are excited to announce that Carol Howard Merritt is the latest speaker to join the NCLI Conference this summer!

Carol Howard Merritt is a pastor at Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., the award-winning author of Tribal Church (Alban Institute, 2007) and Reframing Hope (Alban Institute, 2010), and the Co-Host of the God Complex Radio podcast. Carol leads conferences nationally and internationally on cultural shifts and religion.

Here is an excerpt from one of her latest posts:

Religious Hopes for 2013

Religion can be a force for good or a tool for oppression.

As a Christian in the United States, we can point to a lot of good things in the last year. Passionate energies arose to assist in disasters, push for gun control, call for immigration rights, struggle for marriage equality, long for racial reconciliation, initiate interfaith dialogue, demand a just budget, work for peace and fight for farm workers’ rights. And the list continues as I burst with gratitude for the work that people have done.

I’m proud to be a part of a movement whose great concern is learning to love your neighbor as you love yourself. And as we move into the New Year, I hope those voices of justice will grow stronger and I wish for some other things as well.

I hope that the religious right will drop birth control as an issue. During the political season, the conservative evangelical case against birth control was loud and clear. I spoke to Frank Schaeffer, one of the founders of the religious right, trying to remember my days growing up in a conservative Evangelical household. “I don’t remember birth control ever being an issue before. It wasn’t tied to the evangelical pro-life movement, was it? Did I miss something?” I asked.

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