The Feelings We Feel: Care and Community in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a show that focused on teaching children an ethics of caring for oneself and care for others. This article examines those ethics through the songs “I Like You As You Are” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It contends that these songs focus on a celebration of the self and others, welcoming individuals as they are into the community, and embracing authenticity. This article looks to understand these ethics in a contemporary setting and argues that Mister Rogers and the communal ethics of care that he taught are needed.

Voices of Power

This chapter explores the ambiguities in power dynamics that arise in Paul’s letters when enslaved persons enact religious leadership in the communities to which he wrote. The chapter demonstrates that 1 Corinthians, Galatians, and Philemon illustrate a debate about roles in the communities to which they are addressed, particularly the ongoing debate about whether enslaved persons are fully equal members of the ekklēsia or whether their experiences in slavery are problematic for communal ethics. The chapter examines the rhetoric of these letters, exploring the different stories scholars tell about Paul and slavery. The chapter shifts the methodological focus so that enslaved persons become the center of the story rather than Paul. Ultimately, the chapter argues that early Christian rhetoric continually subordinates enslaved persons because of the contestations of power that arise when enslaved persons act as full participants, even trained leaders, in early Christian communities.

The Prophets and Ethics

Christian ethicists and social justice activists regularly draw upon blistering critiques of religious and political hypocrisy and corruption found in the Hebrew Bible prophets. This chapter concentrates on distinctive methods of ethicists and activists for appropriating and engaging them. Three differing approaches are explored. Walter Rauschenbusch considered the prophets to be essential to Christian moral history. Emilie Townes constructs African American Christian communal ethics relying upon the form of lament in Joel. Finally, selected Christian political activists and leaders demonstrate embodied, lived ethics through their appropriations of prophetic language. Ethics topics such as sexual violence, abortion, racism, and LGBTQ rights are included in the chapter’s emphasis on method and cultural assumptions embedded in the Hebrew prophets and the perspectives of their interpreters.