Commentary
Activists wear oil canister masks as they spill fake oil in front of the venue for COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland on Oct. 29, 2021. REUTERS/Russell Cheyne
Starting Oct. 31, world leaders will gather in Scotland to negotiate the terms of our future. This United Nations climate change conference, called COP26, is an opportunity for leaders to flaunt their climate actions ambition — no leader more so than President Joe Biden, who plans to attend with nearly half his cabinet. This is a show of force from the White House, an indication that political winds have shifted and the United States is prepared to be a global climate leader.
Communities of faith should be an intentional place for survivors of domestic violence to find healing, refuge, and safety. However church can also be an unsafe place that hinders the process of healing. The steps, responses, and practices offered in this article are meant to be a beginner’s guide to what congregations — including lay members — need to know about preventing, recognizing, and responding to domestic abuse in their midst.
In a scene from Colin in Black & White, Colin Kaepernick watches actor Jaden Michael play a teenaged Kaepernick. Image courtesy of Netflix.
The six-episode series available to stream on Oct. 29 is the co-creation of Kaepernick and celebrated director Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th, When They See Us). The series tells the story of Kaepernick’s teen years, when he grew both as an athlete and an individual. Kaepernick must repeatedly decide if he’s going to be true to himself or to who others want him to be, whether it’s how he wears his hair or what sort of future he pursues. It’s a relatable coming-of-age story, but the racial dynamics that Kaepernick confronts make for a more complicated high school narrative.
Pope Francis greets a member of an indigenous community of the Amazon during celebrations for the Feast of Saint Francis in the Vatican Gardens, at the Vatican October 4, 2019. REUTERS/Yara Nardi
Speaking with an Argentine accent, amplifying the voice of the poor, indicting the rich, and betting it all on grassroots movements, we might even ask, do we finally have a liberation theologian in St. Peter’s chair?
Capitalism and racism are united in their reliance on hierarchies of social difference; these hierarchies act as sites of exploitation where conflicts surrounding race, gender, or even borders all reinforce our current political economy. Also, the very acts of living and working, which are structured by capital, place you in conflict with yourself and others. Everyone is impacted by the relational flow and material forms of racial capitalism. And while it is true that everyone is impacted, it cannot be understated that those who are disproportionately impacted by this system are Black and brown people.
I’ve never been a fan of Halloween. I’ve always been more of an All Saints’ Day kinda guy. Just joking; truth is I try to resist the impulse to constantly make distinctions between “the world” and “the church.” The lines between sacred and profane, monster and human, are not easily distinguishable.
A man wearing a homemade raccoon hat at the Justice for J6 rally hosted by Look Ahead America at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 18, 2021.Photo by Allison Bailey/NurPhoto
As Christians, we are citizens of the kingdom of God. But a common roadblock to dedicating our lives to the kingdom of God by loving our neighbors to the best of our ability is the temptation to allow our allegiance to the country in which we live supersede our allegiance to the kingdom of God — to succumb to nationalism.
Amanda 'Butta P' Small is a hip-hop music maven combining her faith, business prowess, and heritage to change the culture.
Pastor Bert Bocachica and his wife lead a church called El Santuario, a Spanish congregation in the Bronx borough of New York City.
Vanessa Martinez Soltero is an activist bridging her Christian faith and Indigenous traditions to sustain herself and community.
Nabsico workers with the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 364 strike outside their bakery owned by Mondelez International in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 21, 2021. Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA
The latest headlines are filled with news of worker shortages, delayed supply chains, and labor strikes. Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations strike tracker reports more than 181 strikes so far this year, with 38 of them taking place in the first two weeks of October, spurring the AFL-CIO to name this month “Striketober.” These strikes span all kinds of industries, from hospital workers to whisky makers.
Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash
Should Christians have anything to do with horror? Is there anything commendable or worthy of praise in the genre?
As a pastor whose love of horror has only deepened over the years, I offer a resounding yes. Horror is a genre uniquely able to invite us into spaces of confession and lament, if only we have ears to hear.
‘The Vale of Rest’ by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt. Oil paint on canvas, 1858-1859. Photo via Tate / CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)
In Lauren Groff’s newest novel, Matrix, monastic life in the High Middle Ages serves as a stunning backdrop for the story of Marie, a nun who feels “her greatness hot in her blood.” Marie arrives at an English abbey as a reluctant teenager, at the appointment of her queen, Eleanor, who expects Marie to become abbess and save the Crown from the public shame of a royal abbey where nuns die of starvation and disease.
A photo of the type of Hasselblad cameras used on the moon, in the “NASA - A Human Adventure” exhibition at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. By superjoseph, via shutterstock.
The most incredible part of landing on the moon is not the making it there, but the safely making it back. NASA’s missions to the moon and back were feats of engineering, math, and creativity. The stories are oft retold from a variety of angles and perspectives, and I will never tire of it.
Some people may not know that when we went to the moon, we left a lot of junk there. Lighter space crafts can escape gravity easier, so anything that didn’t need to come home didn’t. Included on the list of things that didn’t need to come back from Apollo 11 through Apollo 17: Twelve Hasselblad camera bodies and lenses. (Another fun fact: Until recently, one of the cameras that was supposed to return had been missing for nearly 50 years.)
Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton in ‘Mass’ / Courtesy of Sundance Institute
What kind of parent raises a mass murderer? What would the aftermath of a school shooting be like for the parents of the child who shot his classmates and then took his own life. Unimaginable? Mass, Fran Kranz’s writing and directorial debut, immerses viewers in these questions, challenging us to consider our capacity for forgiveness.
Most of the U.S. public doesn’t “know anything at all” about congressional Democrats’ Build Back Better infrastructure plan, according to a CBS poll released this week. Even though the provisions the plan contains could help countless families, the language of “infrastructure” is both distant from our daily lives and too obscure to generate a sense of urgency. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” the prophet Hosea warns (Hosea 4:6). How true that rings now.
As Christians, I believe we must reject the project of the melting pot. In the Bible, the church is not portrayed as an ambiguous, homogeneous entity. Instead, difference and diversity are understood as a strength — as God’s gift to the church (Acts 2).
Ah, the sweet escapism of sci-fi and fantasy. From The Hunger Games to The Force Awakens, women and people of color are presidents, space commanders, and leaders of the resistance without protest or fanfare from those around them. Dystopian America and a Galaxy Far Far Away know no racism or sexism, it seems. But that’s not necessarily a good thing for those of us in the audience. As Atencio wrote of For All Kind, “The willingness to embrace fictional diversity … but an unwillingness to deal with the tensions that would follow, is maybe the farthest stretch on the show.”
Father Paul in 'Midnight Mass' / Courtesy of Netflix
Midnight Mass is the latest from horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan (creator of The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor), who excels in slow-creeping, character-based horror. It’s also a project through which Flanagan, a former Catholic, processes his feelings about scripture, religion, and the church. As an artistic representation of someone deconstructing their faith, Midnight Mass employs horror tropes to explore the ways religion responds to pain, both in ways that heal and ways that destroy.
Hundreds of New Yorkers rally against vaccine mandates in New York City on September 27, 2021. Photo by Mohamed Krit/Sipa USA
The FDA’s full approval in late August of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, known commercially as Comirnaty, has led to a spate of government and corporate vaccine mandates for employees and patrons — as well as the inevitable backlash. Much of that backlash has been on religious grounds, with some Christians claiming exemption from the mandates using what journalist Mattathias Schwartz describes as the “rhetorical Swiss Army knife” of religious freedom.