Commentary

Today we witnessed with shock and moral outrage that our democracy is fragile and in peril. Today we saw an assault on our democracy. We saw a violent insurrection turn what is normally a quiet but sacred procedure to certify electoral votes and ensure a peaceful transfer of power into a dangerous spectacle of sedition and political malfeasance.

Voter registration and turnout numbers — 3 million voters voted early and 76,000 new Georgia voters registered in time for the runoff — signifies the unprecedented sense of urgency and passion that Georgians are feeling. Georgia voting volume is on track to defy historical trends of general-to-runoff election turnout ratios.

I knew there were Christian slaveholders, Christian Nazis, and Christians who opposed the civil rights movement, but in my mind, these people were “Christians” — with scare quotes. These so-called Christians, I imagined, were either conscious hypocrites, using the guise of Christianity to seize and maintain power, or mindless followers of the status quo who never devoted real attention to prayer and scripture.

Pixar’s latest film Soul, opens to the sound of a Queens, New York, middle school’s band class, led by Joe Gardner, a middle-aged, aspiring jazz musician. As someone who played the trumpet in my Queens middle school’s band, the discordant, yet earnest attempt at music immediately transported me back to Mr. Stier’s classroom in I.S. 109, circa 1992. Just as in Joe’s class, the walls of Mr. Stier’s room were covered with jazz posters; he wore a ponytail and, by my memory, he also had an earring.

Reading was the safest way to travel this year — sometimes to another decade and another brand of violence, sometimes to a different continent or a different galaxy altogether. Below are Sojourners' editors' favorite books of the year. Most of these books came out years ago, but by reading them through the lens of 2020, we found new wisdom, escape, resonance, and hope.

While Godmothered and its fairy are far from cinematic perfection, by the time the credits roll, Eleanor and Mackenzie have helped each other step more fully into who they both truly were meant to be. In this way, their relationship — minus the wand, the fairy dust, and any promise of true-love-happily-ever-afterness — more realistically resembles actual godparenting.

The public discourse around criminal justice reform largely revolves around releasing nonviolent offenders. But this narrow focus will never be enough to fundamentally alter the incarceration system. The majority of people in prison have been convicted of violent crimes, and they are habitually denied parole. True criminal justice reform is impossible until we include people convicted of violent crimes in the conversation.

So as we participate in Advent this month, the Old Testament story of Job may be a helpful text to explore. Job addresses the enigma of suffering head-on, mincing no words but also not really answering the question of why we suffer. Perhaps, though, the simple freedom to question God and mourn our losses is just what we need this Christmas.

At a recent annual meeting, seminary presidents in the Southern Baptist Convention doubled down on the SBC’s dismissal of “critical race theory,” which examines the issues of embedded racism across institutions and culture in American society. CRT shows how white supremacy — the belief that some people are more valuable than other people because of their skin color — is not just a personal prejudice but a structural and societal practice in America.