In our home, we have entered a space where we can be our unrefined, imperfect selves. We don’t need to impress each other. We can simply be, and grow as beings. This involves conversations about hard topics and sharing our deepest hurts and struggles with each other, but luckily, it also involves a lot of laughter. I don’t want to brag (OK, maybe I do,) but we are a hilarious bunch. A quote board hangs on our wall, and we regularly add funny one liners (funny to us at least). Different things strike different people as funny, but laughter is truly contagious. Usually it just takes one of us to get the whole table laughing.
Pope Francis denounced the "logic of armed power" in Yemen, Syria, and other Middle East wars on Monday on a landmark visit to the Arabian peninsula where Islam emerged, telling Christians and Muslims that conflicts brought nothing but misery and death.
American Christianity brought us to this point. It preached nationalism and sanctified American imperialism — promoting Manifest Destiny as ordained by God. The prosperity gospel baptized capitalistic greed, it’s preachers vilified the poor, and it’s theologians manipulated scripture to rationalize global colonialism. Salvation was no longer personified through Jesus, but was redesigned to be a political machine, fueled by its ability to control branches of government. This methodology was packaged as “Christianity,” and the gospel became a message of gaining social power and control rather than a call to follow Jesus’ life of selfless service and sacrifice.
The Trump administration is pushing to impose work requirements on Americans who rely on the Medicaid program for their health care. Sixteen states have taken up the President’s team on its explicit invitation to place this extra demand on their states’ residents who count on Medicaid for access to their medicines and treatment. There are high-level discussion about applying Medicaid work mandates across the country.
Republicans realize that work requirements can undercut the ACA’s most effective component: the expansion of Medicaid. They are counting on these regulations inflicting their damage outside of congressional and popular scrutiny. In the process, they are promoting false information on what Medicaid work requirements will do.
To claim that this attack was motivated by a singular form of bigotry is false. Such a claim is also violent and contributes to the culture that silences and erases the complicated reality of compounded oppression experienced by black LGBTQ persons every day. Hate is rarely simple and the intersectionality — or dynamic forms of subjugation individuals face because of their marginalized identities — black same-gender loving people face is at work here.
“The queer community in Chechnya is small, so if one was reported by their family member, they would be tortured to release the information of other gay people,” said Lyosha Gorshkov, the co-president of the Russian LGBT Network. “Many were kept in a basement for a couple of weeks and subjected to humiliation, torture, rape, electric shock. Some reportedly committed suicide."
Polar vortex, global warming, assimilation, Kirk Franklin, women leading churches, Democratic Socialism’s biblical values, and more!
Pope Francis is hoping to persuade a country enmeshed in a regional war that he has condemned to give Catholics more freedom when he becomes the first pontiff to set foot on the Arabian Peninsula.
The National Climate Assessment, jointly released by 13 federal agencies in November, affirmed this risk, noting that across all climate risks, “low-income communities, some communities of color, and those experiencing discrimination are disproportionately affected by extreme weather and climate events, partially because they are often excluded in planning processes.”
As thousands of tourists fawn each year over the opulent trappings of western North Carolina’s Biltmore Estates — a four football-field-sized homage to America’s Gilded Age — one of the starkest examples of the nation’s homeless problem endures less than a mile away.