Commentary

Modernity claims humans are the only citizens — the owners and rulers of nature – thus fracturing our relationship with nature and with one another as we compete to amass or inherit resources. This voracious system is built to protect those with wealth and their resources rather than to protect human and natural life. The deadly consequences of this paradigm are evident: Last month, the United States experienced the hottest June on record since we began keeping track 127 years ago.

If we want to understand this tragedy, we must see more clearly the failure of these physical and social structures that we have built and continue to build. For too long, the Christian imagination has divorced our identities and social worlds from geography, as if we exist in the abstract, apart from the land and the built environment we inhabit. But what if who we are — and especially who we are together — is completely dependent on the everyday spaces we inhabit, like high-rise condos and retirement communities?

As many people in the United States prepared for the holiday weekend, the Supreme Court’s conservative 6-3 majority upheld two laws that restrict voting in Arizona. The first law the court upheld disenfranchises voters if they cast a ballot in the wrong precinct, invalidating not just their votes for local races, but also their entire ballot, including votes cast in U.S. presidential elections or Senate races, even though all eligible voters in Arizona can vote in those races regardless of the district where they live. The other law prohibits most people from delivering another voter’s absentee ballot to a polling place, making it a crime for anyone but a family member or caregiver to do so.

I urge everyone to see The Phantom. It breaks new ground — uncovers new evidence — that cements the conclusion I have maintained since 2006: Carlos DeLuna was an innocent man who was executed for a crime he did not commit.

Shepherding God, be palpably present with us when we dance, snuggle, and enjoy the sensations of the creation you declare good.

Help us to name, define, redefine, deconstruct, claim, and properly pronoun our fabulousness. We commit to properly naming and pronouning the fabulousness of others.

I’ve grown weary of even engaging such attacks on CRT, so lacking are they in intellectual and moral integrity. Never mind that CRT is primarily a legal theory of how U.S. law has and should address racial discrimination, not a program of salvation; never mind that Greenway’s reading of the BFM would prohibit Southern Baptists from voting, speaking at municipal town halls, or engaging in any civic duty that does not literally and explicitly involve evangelism; never mind that critical race theorists, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Robin D.G. Kelley, propose means for overcoming the very “division, guilt and blame” that is supposedly celebrated by CRT proponents. Efforts to convince those so clearly immune to facts are rarely successful.

The actor and activist talks with Sojourners about faith, service, and his new film ‘12 Mighty Orphans.’

The persecution of people because of their gender or sexual identity is not new; what is new is the growing number of asylum claims filed by LGBTQ people who have fled to the United States because they fear persecution due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

If you’ve been taught about Juneteenth at all, the common telling is that President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation pronounced freedom for all enslaved people in states that had seceded from the Union, but that Black Texans weren’t informed until June 19, 1865 — two and a half years later. The delay is sometimes blamed on distance and limited communication or that enslavers weren't inclined to comply with the law. While these may have been contributing factors, these explanations obscure why the Black residents of Galveston, Texas, actually celebrated the first Juneteenth — and obscures how that celebration still speaks to us today