One year after the Valentine's Day massacre inside a Florida school, students and families leading a nationwide push for gun safety will pause on Thursday for the anniversary of the deadliest U.S. high school shooting.
Many students were expected to stay home from a shortened class day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a former student with an assault gun killed 17 people on Feb. 14, 2018.
This week, scores of people will once again experience the grief of missing loved ones who were cut down by a deranged young man with multiple deadly weapons in the high school he shared with his victims. The Parkland, Fla. mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which killed 17 people and injured 17, joins the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which wiped out a classroom of precious children, as two of the most horrific moments in American history. The irony that the Parkland slaughter was on Valentine’s Day only increases the suffering. While many will celebrate having and enjoying their loved ones in their lives, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors will only feel afresh a terrible vacuum.
Christian music singer/songwriter Ellie Holcomb released her first children's album, Sing: Creation Songs, in September with an accompanying children's book called Who Sang the First Song?. In January, she and her partner, Drew Holcomb, frontman of Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, dropped an EP called Electricity.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves sold into human bondage in Jamestown, Va., in August 1619. Although President Trump acknowledged other anniversaries during his State of the Union speech last week —the 75th Anniversary of of the Invasion of Normandy and the 50th Anniversary of the first moon landing — not one word was spoken about the pernicious practice of enslaving our brothers and sisters and its origin in the state of Virginia.
“For us America is our own country, and it’s all the same: hopeless,” the general told his solider.
General Simón Bolívar had lost faith. The great Liberator of Latin America who fought for independence from Spain, with a vision of a continent united as a single nation would never happen. His men wore the wounds of the revolutions his words inspired and only the frail old man at the end of his life knew how worthless they had been. Political and social change was impossible. He had known the cause was lost for years and kept fighting out of despair, with no dream of any meaningful end.
“The timing is right,” said Espaillat, noting that a delayed State of the Union ended up being well-timed with this pre-planned event. “Immigration will obviously have a keen interest among the participants because many folks came here undocumented or many folks are still trying to reunite with their families or are in transition with regards to their DACA status.”
As adults, if we get the chance to deconstruct our childhood faith, it can often be a traumatic process. Many of us share stories about working with a therapist to unpack trauma from the church, whether it is from the purity movement or the ongoing work of colonization. If you have spent much time on Twitter, you might find some of these conversations floating around, especially in ex-evangelical spaces. Many of us who grew up in the white evangelical church are asking questions about things like missions ideology, white supremacy in the church, toxic patriarchy and sexism, and violence against our LGBTQ friends.
As is so often the case, it is the poor and marginalized that are the most vulnerable to these arrogant battles of political will. We have now seen that our leaders were willing to hold families and their children hostage, allowing their wellbeing to be threatened by the reckless shut down of portions of the federal government for nothing more than partisan political gain.
If you’re not familiar with Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperative, you have a lot to learn about agricultural justice in the U.S.
Rigid gender performance is a cultural construct, not a divine decree. Truly, if we are created in the image of God, we are made to transgress narrow definitions of “masculine” and “feminine” behavior. The God of Scripture is neither male nor female, transcending human conceptions of gender altogether. Though frequently referred to with masculine pronouns, at other times God is described in the feminine, as a comforting mother (Isa 66:13) or a hen guarding her brood (Luke 13:34). As Patrick Cheng notes in Radical Love, “God is fundamentally queer,” breaking through any human attempt to restrict God’s gender expression — this is also why Morse’s attempt to lift Jesus up as masculine exemplar rings so hollow; if God and Jesus are one, then Jesus’ “maleness” is purely incidental.