DAMN: Kendrick Lamar’s Radical Lament

Kendrick Lamar is currently one of the world’s most talented lyricists, a generational storyteller, and a Christian grappling with eternal condemnation.

Kion You | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2018

Highlights from the Annual Retreat 2018

With over 220 students and alumni from more than 20 colleges in attendance, this year's retreat was by far our largest yet!

Augustine Collective | Augustine Collective News | January 19-20, 2018

Composing Liturgical Space: A Design Thesis

What if there was a way to spatially communicate the progression of feelings we experience within the different parts of liturgy?

Matthew Barley | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2016

More Than Money: Poverty As a Spiritual Problem

"And so poverty as a spiritual problem is what’s going on in the souls of the poor people, and the souls of the people who let poverty continue."

Olugbenga Joseph | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2016

Interview with Jim Nooney, a Christian CEO

"It takes confidence that the promises of the Bible are true because our American culture is constantly telling us to keep business and religion apart. But what I have found is that you can put them together."

Nicholas Chuan | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2016

4 Take-Aways from the Veritas Forum: Does Science Point to Atheism?

Both panelists agreed on the constant thirst for truth present in both science and religion, and the “obvious tension” in their differences.

Monica Perez | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2015

Committing Amidst Shopping

Let us not be too hasty to accept society’s definition of love as being uninhibiting.

Nicholas Chuan | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2015

An Interview With Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey

"Simply out of interest, I took Ancient Greek my freshman year. It transformed my life!"

Justin Sohn | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2015

Religion in the Age of Religious Terrorism

Now, clearly a line is drawn somewhere between going to church and acts of terrorism, but is there a fundamental difference?

Thomas Hale | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2015

Review of How (Not) to be Secular by James K. A. Smith

How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor is what the author himself, James K. A. Smith, calls “your hitchhiker’s guide to the present.”

Nicholas Chuan | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2015

Texts from God

Let me know when you're free to talk, I've been missing you.

Nia Campinha-Bacote | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2015

The Good News

One of the primary tenets of Christianity is that we are obligated to spread the “good news”—in other words, the Gospel. But what is this good news?

Elizabeth Jean-Marie | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2015

And He Began to Teach Them Many Things

An interview with Professor Matthew Harrison, who previously wrote an article called "Invited to Care" about his calling to teach mathematics to those in prison.

Elizabeth Jean-Marie | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2015

Harvard Ichthus Answers 200 Questions About God At Texts-4-Toasties

"Forty students volunteered to deliver toasties, answer questions [about Christianity], cook, and man the computers in our three stations in Thayer Basement, a Pfoho kitchen, and the Leverett Rabbit Hole."

Augustine Collective | The Harvard Ichthus |

How Does God View Ethnicity?

Since the concept of ethnicity is of human construction, I do wonder: does God see ethnicity?

Elizabeth Jean-Marie | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2014

Invited to Care

There is a tension in the criminal justice system between punishment and rehabilitation. Is it proper justice to educate murderers?

Matthew Harrison | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2014

On God and Suffering

Things become distorted when we are suffering, and it takes an understanding of something bigger than ourselves to realign life’s dimensions again.

Monica Perez and Michael Robinson | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2014

Re-meeting God

According to the Gospel, God doesn’t want to be on stage all the time. He wants to come down and be with the audience.

Mitch Akutsu | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2014

When My Faith Becomes Merely Rules

If my religion were only about me following rules, my faith would be imprisoning and stifling. I’d be guilt-ridden, constantly feeling like I’m not good enough for God.

Cia Mathew | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2014

Eggshells

What is home? My parents immigrated to the States from South Korea, I was born and raised in California, I go to university in Rhode Island, and I am now studying abroad in Dublin, Ireland.

Clare Kim | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2014

Reflections of a Brown Derby

There are nights when I try to sleep but can’t because I am preoccupied with Derby-related things – our adventures and gigs, the group dynamic, our relationships. These people have managed to occupy a nook in my heart that I never really thought I was willing to share.

Russyan Mark Mabeza | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2013

Becoming a Greenhouse

In those empty moments, it was as if the world had suddenly gone quiet, and I was able to finally hear my own thoughts. Deactivating Facebook felt like I was coming up for air.

Elizabeth Jean-Marie | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Fall 2013

Symbols of God

But how are symbols to be used when the divine—whether as God the Father, the divine aspect of Christ, or the Holy Spirit—is as St. John of Damascus puts it: “uncircumscribed and unable to be represented?”

Rachel Himes | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2013

The Didion Conundrum

It’s clawing and creeping and unavoidable, and you become so exhausted and feel so generic in your depression that no one speaks of it. No one speaks of the [sophomore] slump.

Margaret Nickens | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2013

On Mystical Obedience

You’re telling me that God’s commands are not burdensome while I’m struggling to go even half of a day without breaking one? How can you say that his commands are not burdensome when our desires and our wills conflict with his commands?

Andrew Kim | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2013 Volume II Issue II

Language and Its Uses: The Difficulty in Communicating with a Heavenly God

Scripture is littered with evidence that our voices — our interaction with God through language — have divine importance and implication.

Gabriel Brotzman | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2013 Volume II Issue II

The Creamer Medieval Gallery

In her book Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, Carol Duncan equates ritual — here defined as sets of practices which induce a transcendent experience — with the experience of viewing art in a museum.

Rachel Himes | The Brown & RISD Cornerstone | Spring 2013, Vol II, Issue II

Does It Matter That They’re Christian?

Summary: Mumford & Sons, like many Christian bands on mainstream charts, don’t want their album to be taken as religious or as a “Christian statement.” This begs the question, does it even matter that they’re Christian?

Elizabeth Jean-Marie | The Brown Cornerstone | Vol II Issue I, Fall 2012

An Interview with Professor Glenn Loury

Brown University economist Dr. Glenn Loury’s conversion opened his eyes to the reality and necessity of spiritual transformation and to the inadequacy of any purely secular attempt to model human moral behavior.

Philip Trammell | The Brown Cornerstone | Vol. II Issue I, Fall 2012

The Marriage of Justice and Mercy

Christianity has seeming contradictions like a dog has fleas. This one consistently arises: how can a God of justice be, at the same time, a God of mercy? George MacDonald brings this contradiction to a point: “Those who say justice means the punishing of sin, and mercy the not punishing of sin, and attribute both to God, would make a schism in the very idea of God.”

Andrew Kim | Brown Cornerstone | Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2012

July 2018