Sojourners in the News

Other members of the Emergency Coalition include: • Raj Shah, Administrator, US Agency for International Development • Alice Albright, CEO, Global Partnership for Education • Strive Masiyiwa, CEO, Econet Wireless • Kailash Satyarthi, Chairperson, Global March Against Child Labour • Aliko Dangote, Chair, Dangote Group and Founding Member, Global Business Coalition for Education • Jim Wallis, Founder, Sojourner • Archbishop Desmond Tutu • Ricken Patel, Executive Director, Avaaz • Fred van Leeuwen, General-Secretary, Education International • Isha Isatu Sesay, Anchor, CNN International and HLN • Mabel van Oranje, Chair, Girls Not Brides

The two-hour rally featured a variety of religious leaders who said their faith demands reform. Jim Wallis, founder of the evangelical Sojourners, described how Catholic Cardinal Sean O’Malley, archbishop of Boston, held a mass at a border fence in Arizona this month and called immigration reform “another pro-life issue.”

Last November, Fast for Families drew national attention when some of its leaders and supporters fasted for 22 days in a tent near the U.S. Capitol. Lisa Sharon Harper, of Sojourners, a Washington social justice group, was one of them and was on the bus Wednesday. She grew up in Philadelphia.

Michel Zajur, CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Virginia, lauded the entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants and Jim Wallis of the Christian social justice organization Sojourners stressed the religious aspect of immigration reform.

“We’ve been calling on people to fast because now is the time,” said Lisa Sharon Harper (at lectern in photo), who works for the DC-based Sojourners.

The last forty years — basically, ever since Roe vs. Wade — the Christian right has so dominated the way Christianity’s politics and social identity is understood in America, that when the new generation of “the Christian left” — folks like Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Shane Claiborne — came along in the last fifteen to twenty years, it felt like they were truly pioneers. But Walter Wink and Walter Sullivan are, like other “old timers” like Dorothy Day and Jim Wallis, wonderful reminders that progressive Christianity, while always somewhat marginal in America, is hardly an invention of the internet age. On the contrary, Christianity’s quest for peace and justice has deep roots indeed, and both of these men are exemplars worth remembering.

I live in Washington, D.C., a city in which mistakes are messaged and shortcomings are spun. True confession and true repentance do not occur -- unless it is politically advantageous. Naturally, cynicism runs rampant.

Co-writer Ari Handel said in an interview with Cathleen Falsani of Sojourners that Ila was a way to explore Noah's love. "Obviously the notion of barrenness and infertility is a very biblical concept and it fits right in with the Noah story because it’s all about the death of life and the birth of new life; it’s all about second chances and next generations," he explained. "So I think she came out of those places. She ends up also becoming, as you see, in some ways a different kind of a voice — a humanizing voice — that is able to bring Noah back from his despair."

I am continually reminded that we are a Christian country. Evangelist Jim Wallis has pointed out that there are several hundred references in the Bible to helping the poor. Taking food off their plates does not seem very Christian to me.