This week marks a year since the nearly incomprehensible school shootings in Newtown, Conn. Gaping holes in families, lives, and the greater community remain, as the question of why such a thing happened still lingers on everyone’s lips and in minds.
Looking back for answers sometimes only serves to deepen the wounds, rather than help heal them. The shooter demonstrated serious mental illness. He played violent video games, including one called “School Shooting.” He catalogued similar events as they emerged in the news. He holed up in his room, garbage bags on the windows, until his mother helped him buy the gun.
None of this offers us the peace we seek. What we want is an end to such terrible violence, and a relief from the lingering fear that haunts us while we know another incident is only a matter of time. As a parent of two school-age children, I was made painfully aware of the vulnerabilities in their schools as I’d drop them off, sending them, alone, into the building.
For the past three years immigration reform has taken a prominent role in my mind and heart, especially since the Latino college ministry I direct, InterVarsity Latino Fellowship (LaFe), has student members who are undocumented. I have heard stories from our InterVarsity students who have faced insurmountable financial difficulties in paying for college, the fear of being separated from their family members and deep depression and anxiety over the possibility of their own deportation.
It was three years ago at a national Latino Student Conference that I was first confronted with the great sorrow and pain that many of our Latino Dreamer students were carrying. I had one student who had worked very hard to earn an engineering degree but was completely overwhelmed with the sadness that he would not be able to work in his field because he did not have working papers. This young man, who had been a top leader in one of our InterVarsity chapters, had incredible leadership skills, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and great obedience in serving the needs of other students on his campus. He was a model InterVarsity student if there ever were one.
Yet, the sadness, fear and bitterness he expressed to me overwhelmed my own heart and made me realize I had to do more to help these dedicated and gifted students who were living without hope.
Since then I have been arrested for the cause of immigration reform with other committed clergy in New York City. I have raised my voice loudly within my own ministry to make the known the academic and pastoral needs of our own undocumented student members. And now I believe it is time to do deeper spiritual battle through fasting and prayer.
At one point a desperate man whose son was possessed by a violent spirit approached Jesus; the man regularly tried to kill the boy by throwing him in fire or water. The man told Jesus he had already asked his disciples to heal the son but they didn’t have the power to do it. In his love for this father and his possessed son, Jesus healed the boy. Later when his disciples talked to him privately about why they weren’t able to take power over this demon, Jesus told them that this kind of demon could come out only by prayer and fasting.
Many believers are familiar with the term “medical missions.” Less well known, though a growing awareness is popularizing the movement, is the field of environmental missions. The idea’s biblical base is to combine God’s creation care mandate with the additional call of Christ’s “great commission.” What that means and looks like and how it can be cultivated into fruition is the subject of Lowell Bliss’s new book, Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees. Bliss is the director of environmental missions organization Eden Vigil.
The purpose of the newest category of missions, Bliss asserts, is two-pronged. The goal is to integrate the dual aims of the environmental missionary: to care for the environment and to make disciples. Why? Because God is a both/and God, not an either/or God. He cares for both people and the planet; he is concerned with saving both souls and soil. Following Jesus’ example, then, we can be both people and tree-huggers.
Nelson Mandela, the former South African president who died Thursday, had a deep connection with religious institutions.
Mandela was educated, first at Clarkebury and then at Healdtown, Methodist boarding schools that provided a Christian liberal arts education.
“Both were important influences on his life,” said Presiding Bishop Zipho Siwa of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. “Indeed, after his time at Clarkebury, the young Mandela said his horizons had been broadened.”
In Cape Town, retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Mandela was mourned by South Africans, Africans, and the international community as a colossus of unimpeachable moral character and integrity.
“He preached a gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation,” Tutu wrote in a tribute on Allafrica.com.
At the heart of the Vatican’s new “Metamorphosis of Space” exhibit featuring the works of Spanish architect and artist Santiago Calatrava is the first-ever public display for the model of New York’s St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.
The exhibit’s curator, Micol Forti, said the relationship between the project and the Vatican is casual — “It’s not even a Catholic Church,” she said of St. Nicholas — yet the magnetism of the model is immediately apparent.
“This exhibit is part of a dialogue with contemporary culture, and this particular piece is a large part of it,” Forti said. She pointed out an adjacent series of watercolor paintings Calatrava made to show a kind of evolution between the design of the church and a classic portrait of the Madonna and Child.
The Rev. Ray Leonard knew not to wear the clerical collar identifying him as a Roman Catholic priest. It almost certainly would have gotten him deported.
He knew not to celebrate Mass, hear confession, or baptize a child. The acts might have resulted in harassment — or worse, arrest and imprisonment — for the families Leonard cared about.
During a decade spent teaching and helping the needy in some of China’s most impoverished and oppressed regions, the New Jersey priest learned what it was like to live in a land without religious freedom.
It kindled a greater appreciation for his liberties at home. Which is why Leonard, 51, bristled at the U.S. government when it told him he couldn’t hold services at a Georgia naval base during last month’s government shutdown. Leonard, a civilian contractor on the base wasn’t deemed an “essential” employee.
In the short three months that I have been at Sojourners as the director of individual giving, I’ve been humbled and inspired by the countless social justice activists who make up our community. In these three months, I have witnessed activism for immigration reform, a vigil for those most affected by congressional dysfunction, organizing for climate change, a prophetic stand for racial justice, the launching of a new campaign to empower women and girls, and much more.