3. The “Fast for Families” participants mobilize on behalf of immigration reform legislation. Of the various faith-led protests for immigration reform in 2013, few garnered as much attention as the “Fast for Families” campaign. Organized as a partnership between labor groups, religious organizations, and immigration advocates, a rotating band of participants fasted for weeks in a tent on the National Mall to pressure the House of Representatives to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Led by the storied labor organizer Eliseo Medina, fasters hailed from a variety of professions and backgrounds and included several undocumented immigrants and DREAMers. But organizers also listed a fair number of high-profile religious leaders as participants, such as Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition; Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of NETWORK; Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; and Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners.
Source: Nation of Change | Eric Stoner
Eric Stoner is an editor at Waging Nonviolence and an adjunct professor at St. Peter's College. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Nation, Sojourners and In These Times.
Source: Huffington Post
Lisa Sharon Harper
Lisa Sharon Harper is the senior director of mobilizing for Sojourners. She was the founding executive director of New York Faith & Justice—an organization at the hub of a new ecumenical movement to end poverty in New York City. She helped establish Faith Leaders for Environmental Justice and also organized faith leaders to speak out for immigration reform and organized the South Bronx Conversations for Change....
Source: djchuang.com | DJ Chuang
Catherine Woodiwiss (Co-Founder, Trestles Creative Agency) @chwoodiwiss + @trestlestweets
Catherine is a journalist, start-up founder, musician, and community-accumulator… Catherine is also a columnist and editor at Sojourners, a leading faith-based social justice blog and advocacy group in DC. Presenter at session: Do It Together Is the New Do It Yourself #sxsw #DIYalive
Source: Patheos | Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
I wrote a report for Sojourners Magazine last summer, briefly chronicling how a coalition led by a dynamic African-American preacher began to organize seven years ago for Historic Thousands on Jones Street.
Source: Huffington Post | Jim Wallis
I have a vivid memory of my first visit to Sing Sing Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Some young inmates were reading my book, The Soul of Politics, as part of a seminary program in the infamous prison, and they invited me to come discuss it with them. The warden gave me and about 50 young men several hours together, and I will never forget the comment one of them made: "Jim, most of us here are from just five or six neighborhoods in New York City. It's like a train that starts in my neighborhood, and you get on when you are 9 or 10 years old.
Source: Brooklyn Daily Eagle | Francesca Norsen Tate
Responding to Bishop DiMarzio, Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, said, “we also say it’s a Gospel issue. I know for Evangelicals, we’ve been converted by [the Gospel of] Matthew [Chapter] 25, and realize now that how we treat 11 million undocumented people is how we treat Christ himself. This for us is a Gospel issue.”
Source: The Ithacan | Kayla Dwyer
Lisa Sharon Harper challenged her audience in Emerson Suites to imagine a world where children don’t have to worry about school shootings or where their next meal will come from; where everyone goes to the doctor regularly for check-ups and people don’t lock their doors. Then she said to imagine that every person in that world is African-American.
Source: Daily Kos | Robert Fuller
Poverty is the new slavery. --Reverend Jim Wallis, God's Politics
Source: US Catholic | Meinrad Scherer-Emunds
I’m not sure whether this set-up as the anti-Francis was deliberate, but to me the contrast was striking indeed. Over at Sojourners, the Rev. Greg Coates also noticed “The Anti(Gospel) of Francis Underwood”: “I was left in awe at the show’s brutal honesty of what a life purely committed to power potentially looks like.” In the end, Coats says, the show poses a crucial question to us viewers: “Will you follow the way of violent power or will you follow the way of self-sacrificial love? Will you trample over others or will you empty yourself, taking the very nature of a servant? In short, will you choose the way of Francis Underwood or the way of Jesus Christ?”
Given Pope Francis’ theme of mercy and the anti-Francis’ theme of “ruthless pragmatism,” I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to rephrase that last sentence: “Will you choose the way of Francis Underwood or the way or Pope Francis?”
Source: Latino Post | Selena Hill
"Even if we have different political sensibilities, we are united around this cause," said Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners and a leader of the Evangelical Immigration Table.
Source: NBC News | Suzanne Gamboa
“This is a moral issue for us. We also say it is a gospel issue. For evangelicals, we have been converted by Matthew 25 and we realize now, how we treat 11 million undocumented people is how we treat Christ himself,” said Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, a Christian social justice organization.
Source: Wicked Local | Pat Cunningham
Jim Wallis, editor and founder of the evangelical magazine Sojourners, NAILS IT:
Source: Huffington Post | Jim Wallis
"Never in my life has my very faith been called into question like this."
That's what young evangelical writer Jonathan Merritt told me this week. His statement followed a media firestorm, ignited when both he and Kirsten Powers weighed in on proposed laws in Kansas and Arizona that would have allowed business owners to deny service to gay couples, based on conservative religious beliefs about homosexuality. Merritt and Powers each suggested that justifying legal discrimination against gay and lesbian couples might not be the best form of Christian outreach and raised consistency issues of whether discrimination would also be applied to other less than "biblical" marriages, or if just gays and lesbians were being singled out.
Source: Catholic News Service
Rev. Wallis said the unified voice shows that the Christian community is united in believing "immigration reform should not be a victim of our dysfunctional politics. In an era defined by partisanship, immigration reform should be the great exception, the great exemption, to politics as usual."
Source: Dallas.com
Heritage Auctions will present Catherine Cuellar as the guest lecturer for Culture, Community, & Commerce: A View Inside the Dallas Arts District. Cuellar serves as executive director of the Dallas Arts District, the largest contiguous urban cultural neighborhood in the United States and world headquarters of the Global Cultural Districts Network. For two decades she has worked as an award-winning multimedia journalist for national public radio stations and programs, Sojourners magazine and The Dallas Morning News, among others.
Source: Christian Post | Napp Nazworth
The letter is signed by 11 Catholic leaders and eight evangelical leaders, including, Stephan Bauman, president and CEO of World Relief, Eusebio Elizondo, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Migration, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, Jim Wallis, president and founder of Sojourners, and Thomas Wenski,
With twin “Fast For Families” buses as their backdrop and news media cameras in front of them, the crowd was represented by a lineup of speakers which included Lisa Sharon Harper (Sojourners), Dae Joong “DJ” Yoon (NAKASEC), Congresswoman Judy Chu, and Eliseo Medina who spoke of comprehensive immigration reform as a pressing issue of the present.
Source: Musings of a Discerning Woman | Susan Rose Francois
I'm taking a course this semester on Spirituality and Leadership. The course has just started but we've already heard a wonderful variety of voices. This week, our readings include an article by Lisa Sharon Harper, the director of mobilizing for Sojourners. I heard her speak a few years ago at an Interfaith Immigration breakfast in Seattle and was deeply inspired by her commitment to a lived faith that does justice. I just finished reading her chapter, "Singing the Creator's Song in a Strange Land," in the book Learning to Lead: Lessons in Leadership for People of Faith. I am challenged and inspired by this quote, which I in turn share with you in the latest installment of Theology Quotes on the blog.
Source: NBC News | Suzanne Gamboa
“Even if we have different political sensibilities, we are united around this cause,” said Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners and a leader of the Evangelical Immigration Table.