Professor Sam Joeckel’s 21-year tenure at Palm Beach Atlantic University ended after a single complaint from a parent who stated that Joeckel was indoctrinating his students. What started out as a typical day in February soon became a nightmare for Joeckel as the dean and provost of the university waited for him outside his classroom to inform him his teaching contract wouldn’t be renewed.
I embarked on a journey to self-care with a few small changes: affirmations, daily prayer and meditation, regular exercise, and breaks during my day. Within weeks, I felt better physically and emotionally. I felt more secure in my own identity and more connected to other people. But there was an unanticipated benefit: I felt more connected to God. It turned out that the more I cared for myself, the more I wanted to serve God in the world.
As reported by The Salt Lake Tribune, the parent arguing for the ban of the Bible explained that the book “has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.” The anonymous parent wrote to the school board, “Get this PORN out of our schools,” before listing over eight pages of offending verses that seemed to fit the legislature’s definition of what is considered to be “pornographic or indecent.”
Ambitious in scope, The Place We Make is part cultural and geographic history, part spiritual memoir, with thoroughly researched original source documents and contemporary voices. The structure of the book alternates between historical profiles from Vanderpool’s context and Sanderson’s personal moves from the places of ignorance, silence, and exclusion toward empathy, self-disclosure, and community. It is no small task to write as a confessional Christian while clearly identifying the numerous ways Christianity has served to create and perpetuate white supremacy. Sanderson tackles this challenge with humility, often citing theologians and Christians of color who have been wrestling with this paradox from the beginning of colonial modernity.
The writer James Baldwin’s 1967 New York Times essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” is a passionate indictment of white Jewish racism and a condemnation of antisemitism. His essay is clear-eyed and right about most things — except for its thesis.
I was supposed to be taking a writing day this past Monday, but the sound of sirens kept distracting me. Sirens in my Seattle neighborhood are not unusual, but the sirens blared from early morning until noon. By that time, I’d heard 10 or more police cars drive by, which felt different. So, during my lunch break, I resolved to walk down the street to see what all the hullabaloo was about. I figured I wasn’t getting any writing done, so I might as well go investigate.
Dutch military police arrested 25 people nonviolently protesting against nuclear weapons and carbon dioxide emissions at Volkel Air Base about 80 miles south of Amsterdam on Aug. 8 and 9, according to Dutch News and Nukewatch.
Given the renewed attention to the danger of nuclear weapons — thanks, in part, to Oppenheimer — recent developments in Catholic theology regarding the immorality of nuclear arms provide a timely pretext to engage in interdenominational advocacy at the federal level, as well as political and theological education within church communities. We are at one of the most dangerous junctures in decades.
As director of teaching and care at The Allender Center, which offers care and training to help people heal from trauma, Rachael Clinton Chen knows that abuse has many forms. And when sexual violence is committed by a faith leader, it’s often accompanied by another form of violence that’s harder to define: spiritual abuse.
I’ve spent the past six years studying churches and urban renewal, a mid-20th century movement in the U.S. intended, according to President Harry S. Truman, to provide “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” but which many activists now see as the foundation of our contemporary housing crisis. As part of my research, I’ve studied how Christians — especially white Christians — participated in the remaking of American cities. It’s not a history we often tell, but buildings like First Baptist are hiding in plain sight, monuments to a time when white churches allied themselves with forces that displaced communities of color and redistributed their lands.