Magazine

Ed Spivey Jr. 2-15-2024
The illustration shows a man lounging on top of a solar panel with a fruity looking cocktail and a book at his side. He is wearing sunglasses.

Illustration by Melanie Lambrick

WE RECENTLY SPENT a couple hours with a salesman who was promoting the advantages of installing a passive solar system.

He had me at passive.

He also mentioned the federal incentives and tax breaks, but it was the promise of passivity that would have made me jump for joy, had I believed in that level of exertion.

Passive is right up my alley. I love anything that you can do from a seated position. My oven is self-cleaning, I wear no-iron shirts, my refrigerator defrosts itself, sometimes even while I’m in the same room, seated. Those unexpected dripping noises remind me it’s working hard even when I’m not, unless the day’s Wordle is frustratingly difficult.

Not to mention the satisfaction of having skilled workers around the house, role models in an honest day’s work by able-bodied — albeit excessively tattooed — men that are otherwise missing from my home.

Aaron Edward Olson 2-15-2024
The illustration shows a man holding a suitcase and wearing a backpack standing in the frame of an open prison fence gate, looking out. There is a dark sunset behind him.

Illustrations by Hokyoung Kim

This article comes by way of Empowerment Avenue, a nonprofit that works to normalize the inclusion of incarcerated writers and artists in mainstream venues by bridging
the gap between them as a path to decarceration and public safety. — The Editors

IN A DIMLY lit room, Noah sits hunched over his half-finished masterpiece. The canvas comes alive under his skilled hand, revealing the weathered face of an old field worker — the grandfather of a dear friend. Every stroke tells a tale of resilience, etching lines of wisdom and hardship that speak to a life often overlooked. As the evening unfolds, Noah’s focused concentration becomes a beacon, drawing curious onlookers who gather around to witness the birth of art.

This is how I think of Bonifacio Alcantar-Maldonado, who I know by his prison handle, “Noah.”

Known outside by his childhood nickname “Junior,” Alcantar-Maldonado is incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Wash., where I am serving a life sentence. His life is now defined by two cruel political realities — heartless immigration policies and harsh criminal laws. His story illustrates the waste of human potential by a politics that promotes fear of those struggling in other countries and at home.

Laurel Mathewson 2-15-2024
The illustration shows a woman who's eyes are closed sitting on a chair, with her hands open and facing up in a receiving posture.

Illustration by Owen Gent

THE INTERIOR CASTLE, the best-known text of 16th-century Spanish saint Teresa of Ávila, is a tour of the inward ways we relate to God, with varying intensity, awareness, and intimacy. In Spanish, the book is simply Moradas, or “Dwellings,” a title I find more appealing and helpful than the English title, mostly because “dwellings” sounds approachable, universal, and less precious.

Teresa was a grounded mystic. She is down-to-earth in her prose, her witty and candid teaching, and her lived experience. It could be argued that every “true” mystic or saint is grounded or has some element of both the active and contemplative life. Teresa strikes me as remarkably and robustly balanced, in a way that her basic reputation as a mystic sometimes betrays. She is notably resolute in both her defense of the reality of “supernatural” prayer experiences and her insistence that this loving movement of God to an individual must then extend into the world rather than curve in on itself. What we might call her grounded nature even extended into her prayer dialogues with Jesus: Once, when complaining honestly to Christ about her many struggles, she heard a response to this effect: “Don’t be troubled; so do I treat my friends.”

Her tart response? “I know, Lord — but that’s why you have so few friends!” In many of her waking days, she worried that Christ has so few “good friends,” and tried to encourage her contemporaries to become better friends of God. But she is clear-eyed and honest about the things that stand in the way of that friendship, from within and without.

 

The Editors 2-15-2024
The image shows Elvira Arellano, a hispanic advocate for undocumented immigrants. There are monarch butterflies circling her head.

Elvira Arellano, a Mexican-born advocate for undocumented immigrants to the U.S., gained national recognition in 2006 when she took sanctuary in Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago. She requested asylum in 2014. Her case is still pending. / Illustration by Clarissa Martinez

WELCOME TO ANOTHER U.S. election year. The man atop the Republican elephant charges forward. The incumbent astride the Democrat's donkey stubbornly digs in his heels. We at Sojourners seek to follow Jesus in his joyful mission of liberation for all. We see this in Georgia, through the holy imperfect work of racial reparations, as reported by assistant editor Josina Guess. We see it in California, where former Sojourners fellow Laurel Mathewson finds unexpected intimacy with God through prayer and study of Teresa of Ávila. 

Josina Guess 2-15-2024
The image is a collage with a yellow background with rectangles showing the sides of an apartment building. In the middle is a black and white image of a Black family of seven.

WEEDS GROW THROUGH a rusted wash pail in a thicket beside the University of Georgia’s West Parking Deck in Athens, Ga. Littered with the detritus of college life — beer cans, a condom wrapper, Styrofoam containers — this area, unlike the otherwise pristine campus, is neglected and uninviting. Walk in anyway. Look under brambles to find a bent scrap of aluminum roofing, a green Coca-Cola bottle, a cooking pot, and a plastic toy rifle. These objects, buried under vines and rotting logs, form the understory of what used to be a working-class African American neighborhood called Linnentown. Children would swing from grapevines to get across the creek. Now college students, high-rise dorms, and cars swirl above the 22 acres of the erased community. This patch of land, mostly buried under concrete and steel, was stolen from the Cherokee and Creek people first, but the people who remember the second forced removal are still alive. They can’t get their land back, but there is a growing movement for redress for communities like Linnentown.

From 1962 to 1966, the city of Athens used eminent domain under the Urban Renewal Act to force Linnentown residents out of their homes so that the University of Georgia could build three dormitories and a parking lot for their growing, mostly white, student body.

The children of Linnentown are in their 70s and 80s now. As a child, Hattie Thomas Whitehead ran from yard to yard with her playmates and sometimes snatched pears from Ms. Susie Ray’s tree. Christine Davis Johnson enjoyed pears, apples, and pomegranates from the trees in her own yard. They both remember the bulldozers running in the middle of the night, the intentional fires, and the sense of outrage when their parents and neighbors were forced to accept a pittance for their homes and land.

“It was a warm place to live,” remembered Johnson, who was 20 in 1963 when she and her newly widowed mother had to move. Johnson bore double grief that year from her father’s death and the loss of her childhood home. “No hate. My mother didn’t teach me hate,” Johnson said, as she thought about how her tight-knit community was torn asunder. “It’s gone, it’s over, don’t go back,” her mother would say to her. Against her mother’s advice, Johnson would sometimes drive through what used to be her neighborhood, just to remember.

Raj Nadella 2-12-2024
The illustration shows two purplish hands breaking apart a loaf of bread. The background is a purple and yellow burst of lines coming from the center.

Illustration by Lauren Wright Pittman 

IN THEOLOGIAN STANLEY Hauerwas’ influential book A Community of Character, he highlights the role narratives play in the formation and identity of a community. Stories have a descriptive function but also a formative function. Stories describe key events in the life of a community and preserve that community’s history. They also shape the community’s worldview and character. Stories influence the community’s ethos and commitments. They drive its actions. Gospel stories testify to the nature of Jesus’ mission and the ethos and commitments of the early church. They foreground Jesus’ character traits, which help shape our own ethical outlook and enable us to imagine an alternative moral space in society.

We live in a fraught political context where Christian identity has become a contested moral space. It’s a space increasingly shaped by dangerous nationalisms that celebrate oppressive power and that depict God in ways that provide theological justification for consolidation of power over others. However, the lectionary texts this month challenge just such depictions of God. They lift up the image of a God who suffers with the suffering rather than a triumphant God exercising domination. They feature characters, including Jesus, who insist that it matters what stories we tell and how we tell them.

What stories do we tell about the church today and how do we tell them? Do such stories shape our legacy as Christians and our moral imagination? How do we continue to tell those stories faithfully and meaningfully, allowing them to shape our lives, even in an era when many Christians are attracted to stories of a militant, oppressive God rather than to God’s motifs of justice?

Joseph Ross 2-12-2024
The illustration depicts Elijah McClain, a Black man wearing glasses, next to his violin. His eyes are closed.

Illustration by Laura Freeman 

For Elijah McClain (1996-2019). Killed by police in Aurora, Colo., he was known as a gentle soul who played his violin to soothe anxious animals in shelters. 

If only a violin could redeem
the world.

Your skin, glowing like the violin’s wood,
might still sing its humble lament.

Brandon Grafius 2-12-2024
The image shows the cover of the book redeeming violent verses by Eric Seibert, which is kind of a marbled blue and red, on a light red background.

Westminster John Knox

ONE OF MY EARLIEST memories of church is being in the children’s choir, pumping my fist in the air and yelling as we sang about David’s victory over Goliath. While my vocal pitch was suspect, I didn’t lack for enthusiasm. But the whole performance taught me something dangerous: Righteous violence is exciting. It’s a lesson I’ve spent a large part of my adult life trying to unlearn.

Eric A. Seibert is a key figure in working through the violent passages of the Hebrew Bible. In his newest book, Redeeming Violent Verses: A Guide for Using Troublesome Texts in Church and Ministry, Seibert argues that the church can’t run away from violent Bible verses. Moreover, he writes, we must incorporate them into our religious experiences. But, Seibert cautions, we must always do this in a way that rejects the glorification of violence that is often found within scripture. Seibert offers several ways for church leaders to accomplish this, including refocusing attention on the victims of violence, or retelling the story to imagine a nonviolent outcome. Individual chapters highlight some specific ideas for how this can be done in children’s education, liturgy, and preaching.

Avery Davis Lamb 2-12-2024
The photo shows the book "The Quickening" at an angle with a shadow.

Milkweed

IN THE QUICKENING: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush explores both the quickening in her own body — the first feeling of the life moving in her belly — and the quickening pace of climate change.

In 2019, Rush embarked on a scientific sea-bound expedition to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, a writer among dozens of scientists. Their journey, via an icebreaker ship, was the first of its kind, bringing together geologists, paleoclimatologists, oceanographers, and a dozen other flavors of scientists to better understand how climate change is affecting a glacier at the end of the world.

Thwaites Glacier is enormous, bigger than the state of Florida and up to 4,000 feet thick. Because of its sheer size and vulnerability to collapse under warming, Thwaites is often referred to as the “Doomsday Glacier.” This one glacier contributes to about 4 percent of global sea-level rise, and whenever it collapses, it will cause global sea levels to increase by more than two feet.

Jenna Barnett 2-12-2024
The image shows two girls in pink, the one in the front is holding a small electric fan, and the one in the back is holding onto the other girls' arm.

From XO, Kitty

IN THE GEN-Z romance XO, Kitty, Netflix platformed an uncommonly tender father-daughter exchange. “I have feelings for my friend Yuri, who’s a girl,” says Kitty, an American attending high school in Seoul, Korea. Speaking to her father across continents and generations, she’s visibly nervous to come out. He’s nervous too, but only because his daughter called him in the middle of the night. “Oh, thank God,” he exhales. Confused, she asks, “Thank God I’m bi? Or pan? Or fluid?” He smiles. “Whatever pan or fluid is, thank God you’re safe and healthy.”

I realize it’s doubtful the father is literally engaging the divine here — I don’t even know if he’s Christian — but I’ll take what I can get. Depictions of religious parents embracing their children’s queerness are rare. Christian coming-out stories are usually serious dramas, not binge-worthy rom-coms.

The Editors 2-12-2024
The picture shows a book cover on a blue background. The book is called "Trash" and has a picture of a trailer on it.

Broadleaf

Class Over Race

In Trash: A Poor White Journey, chaplain Cedar Monroe explores the complex dynamics of being poor and white in the U.S. Grounded in liberation theology, the author ultimately calls communities to embrace multiracial solidarity and reject “the empty promises of white supremacy.” Broadleaf

JR. Forasteros 2-12-2024
The image is of an ipad screen showing the text with Jesus app, which has options for various biblical characters you can talk to.

From Text With Jesus

THE AD FOR Text With Jesus promised “A Divine Connection in Your Pocket.” Developed by Catloaf Software, the app is an artificial intelligence chatbot that takes on the persona of the Alpha and Omega. In the paid version of Text With Jesus, you can also chat with Mary, the 12 apostles, Moses, and dozens of other biblical characters, including Satan (if you dare to enable him in the settings menu). Cue eye roll.

In November 2022, ChatGPT went public. With Generative AI now at our fingertips, offering conversational responses to users’ prompts, the AI revolution was officially in full swing. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI raced to provide the most accurate, engaging chatbot. But no one has taken the messianic furor around generative AI quite as literally as Catloaf.

A few years before launching Text With Jesus, Catloaf president and CEO Stéphane Peter had created Texts From Jesus, an app that sends users a daily Bible verse. In an email interview with Sojourners, Peter explained that the innovation of ChatGPT offered “a compelling new element of interactivity.” Instead of a static quote from the New Testament the new app lets users have conversations with an AI Jesus.

The picture shows the legs of a girl standing on the bank of the Rio Grande, holding a Barbie doll by its hair.

Herika Martinez / Getty 

WE DON'T HAVE typical days [assisting asylum seekers]. It just depends on what the new U.S. law or policy is for immigration. The CBP One application is the only way [asylum seekers] can now enter the U.S. You have to use the app on your phone every day, so you’re making choices: Do I feed my children today or do I pay for internet so I can hopefully get an appointment? The CBP One application is a lottery. Some people play for eight months straight. Some play for one week. You never know when you get picked. We bought Starlinks [satellite internet] for the shelters we run so asylum seekers could have internet access and we give out our passwords to everybody. We want you to have that chance to legally cross into the U.S.

The illustration show a patchwork heart on a dark blue background

Shanina / iStock

I RECENTLY HAD a conversation where I found myself feebly describing the pain of caring for an ill and aging parent. My wife, who is an exceptional curator of the emotional landscape, aptly identified my experience, my grief, as an “ache of the soul.” I find no better words for an experience so enveloping, so permeating through my body, my being, down to a cellular level — like a wave of loss that dredges the depths of the soul.

Grief can be complex and does not always begin with a terminal event. Surveyors of the human experience know well the “little” griefs that happen: the waning connection with the living; the loss of memory; the loss of energy and vitality. A once-doting parent who often inquired “Why haven’t you called?” no longer has the energy to do so. Meanwhile, whether relationships with our lost loved ones were good, complicated, or even nonexistent, the ache of the soul can be overwhelming.

Bill McKibben 2-12-2024
The graphic shows a typewriter with words and letter in the background, on a multi-colored, striped canvas.

VladSt / iStock

RELIGIOUS PEOPLE ARE used to the idea that words matter — it’s why we pay attention to scripture and go over the language carefully in sermons and Bible studies. Lawyers know words matter too — it’s why they pay attention to contracts and argue over “shall” vs. “may.” But in political life, we generally assume words are cheap: You say what you want, and everyone knows it’s “just words.”

The final declaration of December’s global climate talks (COP28) falls somewhere in between. It’s not gospel, and it’s not even binding law — there’s no enforcement mechanism. But it’s argued over, carefully, and when countries sign on, they theoretically mean it. So, it was a great victory for campaigners when the world’s governments caved to pressure and put this sentence into the final agreement: The time has come for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.”

This was, unbelievably, the first time in 28 of these global climate talks that the words “fossil fuels” had slipped into the text (it’s as if it took 28 lung cancer conferences before someone mentioned “cigarettes”). And it’s not as if it calls for an immediate end to the use of fossil fuels — sadly, given our long delays, that’s not possible.

Maria J. Stephan 2-12-2024
The illustration shows lots of arms with different skin tones reaching out to put their envelopes in a ballot box, with an American flag in the background.

stellalevi / iStock 

DEMOCRACIES OFTEN DIE by a thousand small cuts. The slide from a robust, if unfinished, democracy to an authoritarian government is incremental and uses inherent weaknesses in a country’s institution and culture. In the U.S., racism has been a core weakness debilitating progress toward a vibrant inclusive democracy, exploited by autocrats to maintain power no matter the cost to human dignity and freedom.

Since 2015, the U.S. democracy score has slid from 92 to 83, according to Freedom House’s global index, lower than any democracy in Western Europe. At a point when pro-democracy and anti-racism movements need to be strongest in the U.S., we find them at odds.

I work in many pro-democracy coalitions committed to political and ideological pluralism where it is challenging to identify the role of white supremacy and Christian nationalism in undermining democratic norms. Conservatives see these as “leftist” issues and moderates fear dividing an already fragile coalition. I also work with political progressives who often see police brutality and mass incarceration as aberrations in a functioning democracy rather than direct attacks on democracy itself, as political scientists Vesla M. Weaver and Gwen Prowse have laid out in their analysis of racial authoritarianism and as Black intellectuals and activists have understood for decades.

Authoritarianism is a system that concentrates wealth and power in a relatively small group of unaccountable people. Authoritarian systems are made up of authoritarian leaders and their institutional enablers, including members of political parties, media outlets, businesses, and religious institutions who provide autocrats with critical sources of social, political, economic, and financial power. Authoritarian systems engage in a range of anti-democratic behaviors to consolidate or expand power, such as weaponizing disinformation, gutting institutional checks on power, subverting free and fair elections, undermining civil liberties, and condoning political violence.

Lindsay Koshgarian 2-09-2024
The illustration shows army planes dropping bombs with dollar signs on them.

sorbetto / iStock

FOR MANY, TAX season is a scramble. Where are the receipts? How much do we owe? Why is it so complicated? But it’s also an annual opportunity to review our social contract, our shared moral obligation to fund the common good. The taxes we pay can affirm life, care for our elders, feed the hungry, house the poor, and care for creation. Taxes can also underwrite a bloated military budget that takes life and incentivizes war.

Until 2015, the largest segment of a typical tax bill did not support programs of social uplift for Americans, but instead supported the military-industrial complex and war. Over the last few years, however, there’s been a shift, even as military costs have continued to rise. That shift is due in part to expanded health care access — but also in part due to health care inflation. Now, providing affordable health care for those over 65 or on limited income through Medicare and Medicaid is the most significant portion
of your tax bill. Paying for war or supporting Americans at home are in a battle for top tax billing.

The average U.S. taxpayer contributes more than $13,000 each year in federal income taxes, according to our research at the National Priorities Project. That’s not a small chunk of change for anyone but the wealthiest among us. When we pool our funds, our federal income taxes are a powerful force, accounting for nearly half of federal revenue (much of the rest also comes from us, in the form of other payroll taxes).

Jim Rice 2-09-2024
The illustration shows a marble bust of Plato in the back of a closet with clothes hanging in front of it

Illustration by Sam Brewster

IF IT'S CURRENT, it’s cool. Anything old, unless it’s retro, is worth ignoring. C.S. Lewis called that attitude “chronological snobbery.” He defined it as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.” Such an approach carries two distinct but related dangers: One, as Arthur Lindsley of the C.S. Lewis Institute put it, “we need the help of past ages in order to see our own times more clearly.” And two, we lose the ability to benefit from truths discerned by our predecessors — the wisdom of the ages.

Abby Olcese 2-09-2024
The image shows a Nazi commandant smoking in his yard, and the photo was taken through bars on a fence. The man wears a white button up with a black tie.

From The Zone of Interest

JONATHAN GLAZER’S FILMS aren’t really stories; they’re experiences. His work is moody and image-driven. Plot matters less than concept, which often makes his work feel like it should be viewed in an art museum rather than in a theater. This is certainly true of his latest, The Zone of Interest, a loose adaptation of a novel by Martin Amis.

Glazer’s film follows a Nazi commandant and his family who live next door to Auschwitz. Theirs is a disturbingly wholesome life — a study in what philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil,” the bureaucratic just-following-orders mentality that allows evil to proliferate. As such, it’s also a timely film to consider in the context of rising authoritarianism around the world.

A cartoon woman, stylized to look like Snoopy from Peanuts, is lying on top of an American flag, with rain falling. Her eyes are closed.

Illustration by Melanie Lambrick 

YOU THOUGHT YOU were going to be selected for the trial of some of the fascists who staged an insurrection at the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. You went through jury selection and everything! But for some reason (maybe your use of the word “fascists”), they turned you down. What’s next?

Here’s what to expect when you’re expecting Jan. 6-jury-related grief:

1. Denial

C’mon. There’s no way. Why wouldn’t they want me? I am a morally upright and very impressive person who has all the right opinions and does all the right things. I am a good Christian who believes that God’s law is what matters most, and I will do the right and just thing even when it is against human law. I am the most law-abiding citizen of the United States re: God’s law. Which is totally relevant to what the judge is looking for. Totally.