I can’t help but think old William Penn would be proud of Gov. Wolf earlier this year as he made his announcement to halt all executions. Penn was a pacifist and a serious skeptic of capital punishment. His Quaker heritage held that every human being carries the essence of God, and that no one should ever take the life of another, not even the state.
As Pope Francis leads worship on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the heart of Philadelphia, a statue of William Penn will be looking down on him from atop City Hall, and I can’t help but think our Quaker forefather will be smiling — especially as Pope Francis continues to insist that every person carries the image of God in them… and that no one is beyond redemption.
I look forward to the end of the death penalty, and I hope we get one step closer to it as the pope comes to the City of Brotherly Love.
What has surprised me over the years is how many men are now registering to take the Sexual and Domestic Violence course and are taking violence against women seriously and have contributed greatly to the conversation. Because the class has a balance of men and women, we have been able to embrace the presence of violence against men while still emphasizing the social, systemic, and historical context that gives rise to violence against women and why the course is necessary.
As Mariame Kaba of Project Nia notes, police violence is not simply just the killing of peoples. It includes the every day forms of harassment, surveillance, and profiling that support both gender and race hierarchies.
The campaign to #sayhername is not simply about remembering and organizing around black women and other women of color who have been killed by the police. It is about re-conceptualizing what police violence means. When we center women of color in our analysis, we see that police violence is much more than individual acts of police brutality. It is an entire system of harassment and surveillance that keeps oppressive gender and racial hierarchies in place.
We are then left with the task of not just holding individual police officers to account, but re-conceptualizing what justice, safety, and accountability should be.
There is a long pause near the end of Sandra Bland’s first # SandySpeaks video, made in January of 2015. It lasts almost five seconds, and in that pause my calling resides. There is no other moment I identify with more solidly.
Near the end to her video, Sandy says, “It’s time for me to do God’s work…”
Then the pause comes, with a sigh in the middle.
Then, “I know everybody don’t believe in God, which is fine. But I want you to know that on Sandy Speaks, I’m gong to talk about God, because for me has truly opened my eyes and shown me that there is something out there we can do.”
Early in the course, probably in the first class, Professor Caldwell dropped a simple yet profound piece of knowledge on us that has stayed in my head ever since: "Racism is gender-specific.”
On a personal level, this statement affirmed what I already knew through life experience but hadn't given much thought: my experience of race and racism in a female body comes with a unique set of reactions and interactions that differs from that of the black men and boys in my life. In a similar way, I had to admit that there were certain expressions and negotiations of black life emanating from male embodiedness that I would never experience.
The hard part came in being able to acknowledge both to be true, intellectually and practically, without feeling like I had to suppress one part of my self in order to embrace another part of my self. On paper, it seems like the right thing to do to honor and respect differences within a group that has much in common. Yet what I have found in over twenty years of working in the social sector and in faith communities is that it is a rare thing when we are able to live this out in the real world.
At times, I have been a struggling Catholic, a joyful Catholic, a conflicted Catholic.
A few months ago, when I cut ties with my longtime parish, I added a new adjective: A “homeless” Catholic.
I joined a long line of parishioners leaving our beloved home, a once-engaging community devoted to social justice that walked in the steps of a man named Francis long before he was pope. Our parish had grown increasingly gloomy around the edges, its spirit deflated by new leadership that valued strict adherence to doctrine above all else.
As my friends and fellow parishioners exit in this trying hour, the words I hear from them again and again are these: This pope, the one coming to the U.S. in a little over a week, he gives us hope.
In 1851, attendees of a feminist convention gathered in a packed hall in Akron, Ohio. It was a time when — even in the midst of a fight for women’s rights — mostly men spoke. They talked of dainty women — delicate and deserving of special protection.
Sojourner Truth sat in their midst. Miss Truth sat quiet, listening to men fill space with empty arguments about why women should or should not have the vote. Finally, she rose to speak and a visceral wall of hostility rose from the masses to greet her. The voice of this "n___ger woman" could muddy the message, they hissed. It could conflate the movement for women’s equality with the abolitionist movement — and that would be the death of suffrage, they feared.
But, as Dr. King liked to quote, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.”
In the spirit of Aug. 26's Women’s Equality Day, we took to social media and the blogosphere to celebrate the ratification of the 19th Amendment and 95 years of women voting in the U.S. However, as some of our supporters rightly pointed out, that landmark constitutional victory did not guarantee all women the right to vote. Our efforts should have acknowledged that painful reality.
As we look back at the suffrage movement, it’s important to acknowledge how racism tainted this historic fight for the vote. Many black women activists — such as Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper — were staunch supporters of women’s rights, yet experienced discrimination from fellow suffragists and white supremacists. These divisions, along with conflicting political interests, caused immense friction within the suffrage movement, thus revealing the challenges of fighting sexism in a deeply racist society.
Yossi Cohen was shocked when city inspectors warned him last month to close his downtown convenience store during the Jewish Sabbath or else be socked with fines.
“For 20 years I’ve been open during Shabbat (the Hebrew for Sabbath) and suddenly the city decides I have to close?” said Cohen, one of eight convenience store owners ordered to shut down from sundown Friday until Saturday night.
“The message is clear: The municipality doesn’t want non-religious people in this city.”
The closure order, which faces a court hearing Sept. 16, was part of a compromise that Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat recently struck with ultra-Orthodox city council members who threatened to block a movie multiplex from opening on the Sabbath in a secular part of the city unless the convenience stores were shut on the Sabbath.
Today 100 women from all across the country are embarking on a 100-mile pilgrimage from a detention center in York County, Pa., to Washington, D.C., a nine-day journey calling attention to the plight of immigrants in the run-up to Pope Francis’ visit to the nation’s capital.