Magazine
Illustration by Melanie Lambrick
I MISSED SEVERAL church services growing up, but I rarely missed quarterly potluck Sundays. As Jesus modeled through his ministry and miracles, free food is an essential motivator. But alas, not all free food is created equal. So here is my definitive ranking of church potluck staples — the good, the bad, and the divisive. Because this is a Christian ranking, we’ll go in ascending order: The first shall be last.
7. Lemon Sugar Water
Don’t trust an aluminum container labeled “lemonade,” especially if it’s beside the dispenser of “coffee,” aka “coffee-flavored water” (I said what I said). The deacons thought two packets of Country Time Lemonade mix could multiply for the masses, but it is a diluted miracle, at best.
6. Stone Soup
I loved the parable the first time Pastor Jerry shared it during the children’s sermon: A stranger comes to town with an empty pot, throws in some stones, and stirs it with such prolonged passion that neighbors begin showing up, adding carrots, potatoes, and more until the soup is big enough to feed the whole town. A good lesson on how to trick strangers into being hospitable. But you can’t keep bringing a vat of stones to the potluck, Jerry. It’s a choking hazard, and the rocks look suspiciously like our parking lot gravel.
Illustration by Jocelyn O'Leary
SOME OF MY fondest memories of my homeland, India, are of food, family meals, and big community banquets. My culinary tastes are versatile, but I explore Indian food as often as possible. What a joy to join a table filled with chutneys, biryani, coconut shrimp curry, aloo gobi, raitas, and dal with the scents of citrus, ginger, cardamom, coriander, and cumin inviting us all. Such meals, for me, are not just an act of consuming delicious food but a means of recalling stories and images of home. Many memories are shaped around the tastes and smells of food. Those memories become part of our experiences and shape our identity. Our relationship with food operates on both primal and profound levels. Food fuels our bodies physically, but meals are also where people express themselves. People are creative in their cooking. They send a message through their food.
Food is also a metaphor for social and economic structures in our contemporary contexts as well as in the Bible. Meals are occasions where people either enact inclusion and deep care for others through table fellowship and radical hospitality, or practice exclusion and tell others they are not invited. In that way, food functions as an extension of our values, of ourselves.
From the earliest parts of the Christian story, food is central. Jesus presents himself as the bread from heaven, our liberator. He offers himself as bread — blessed, broken, and shared for the world. He feeds the hungry and enjoins us to do the same, in his name.
Knopf
MARTYRS HAVE IT easy, thinks Cyrus Shams, the 20-something protagonist of Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel. “Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus?” At least they had clarity and purpose, Cyrus reasons.
In Akbar’s Martyr!, Cyrus, a first-generation Iranian immigrant, is an aspiring poet and martyr. His problem, he thinks, is that he doesn’t know what to die for.
Cyrus’ mother Roya was killed when she was a passenger on a jet that was shot down by a U.S. warship (inspired by the real-life downing of Iran Air Flight 655). Her death leaves a gaping wound in the Shams family: Cyrus is haunted by survivor guilt and his father self-medicates with alcohol. Martyr! is in part a meditation on the inherited weight of history and grief.
This burden seems particularly true for immigrants in the U.S. — or anyone who carries the weight of multiple identities. Sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the “double consciousness” of Black Americans, who have historically carried within themselves at minimum two narratives: the American dream as well as the nightmare.
Doubleday
PERCIVAL EVERETT’S NOVEL James is something of a spiritual successor and corrective companion to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When I learned that Everett, who is a fan of Twain’s work, was writing a novel from the perspective of Twain’s character, “N----- Jim,” I knew it’d be a must-read (note: Twain and Everett print the censored word in full). But I decided to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn first, and while not necessary before reading James, I’m glad I did.
Everett’s novel is set during the time leading up to the Civil War. When James discovers that he’ll be sold and separated from his wife and daughter, he runs away; he eventually runs into Huckleberry Finn, who has faked his own death to escape his abusive father. James and Huck form an alliance and begin making their way down the Mississippi River. This is a perilous journey, both because of the precarity of the river and because of the thing that continues to haunt the United States: race. James is a slave, and so he is raced as Black; Huck, a pubescent prankster, is free and so he is raced as white. But these designations ultimately obscure the human connection between the two characters and their respective groups.
George Mangold / iStock
I REJOICED WHEN the cicadas emerged in spring of this year. My family moved to Georgia 13 years ago, missing the periodical cicadas here by a few months. This year, trillions of cicadas from two different broods emerged across 17 U.S. states. It was the first time since 1803 that those broods’ 17- and 13-year cycles were in sync. Some see them as nuisances or pests. I marvel at them. Before this year, I hadn’t heard the distinct song of Magicicada trecidem, a member of the Great Southern Brood whose droning wail prompted worried citizens in South Carolina to call the police on male cicadas for their lovesick racket. Some days I heard the constant blare as a lament for all the wickedness in the world; other times I took it as a call to prayer. Maybe that is what prayer is: bemoaning the horrors and tuning into a God who cares about everything from nations to Magicicada—and listening to a God who cries with us.
W. Norton
Scriptural Time Travel
For the average reader, understanding scripture’s historical context can be overwhelming. Hosted by scholar Helen Bond and journalist Dave Roos, the podcast Biblical Time Machine provides an accessible entry point into biblical scholarship. Episode topics include slavery among early Christians and first-century childhood. BibleOdyssey
From Guardians of the Galaxy
IN THE CLOSING scenes of Marvel’s original Guardians of the Galaxy, we find our heroes in a tight spot. The group — escaped science experiment Rocket Racoon, giant sentient tree Groot, assassin Gamora, ex-convict Drax, and mercenary Peter Quill — have been grudgingly working together to protect a powerful artifact from falling into the wrong hands. Because they’ve each been pursuing their own agendas instead of working together, they are close to failure. It’s up to Quill (Chris Pratt), to convince them to start working as a team.
“I look around at us, and you know what I see?” he asks them. “Losers.” Noting their incredulous faces, Quill qualifies, “I mean, like, folks who have lost stuff.” He’s right; each of these tentative allies have experienced loss, trauma, and unresolved grief that taught them not to trust others.
Pilgrims gather for Christmas services at the rock-hewn Church of St. George (Biete Ghiorgis), the best known of the 11 monolithic churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia. / MWayOut / iStock
COMPLETELY BY COINCIDENCE, travel writer and translator Shahnaz Habib once joined thousands of pilgrims in Lalibela, Ethiopia. Habib’s trip happened to overlap with Ethiopian Christmas, which brings Ethiopian Orthodox Christians from across the country and world to the town, famous for its medieval rock-hewn churches.
Detailing her experience in her book Airplane Mode, a personal history of travel with a sharp eye for the colonial legacies in tourism, Habib calls Lalibela’s churches “marvels of subterranean engineering.” Carved from red volcanic rock, they sit embedded in the ground, connected by tunnels. The complex of structures was built in the 12th century as an homage to Jerusalem, complete with replicas of Christ’s Nativity crib and tomb.
Habib observed as her fellow travelers lined up around the churches to kiss crosses offered by priests: “A kiss at the top of the cross, a kiss at the bottom, a touch of the cross to the forehead. Hundreds of kisses every hour.” She noted the procedural quality of the ritual.
“To lose oneself in a crowd. To walk the beaten path. To wait and be bored,” she writes. “Perhaps what separates the tourist and the pilgrim is not the reasons for their travel but the satisfaction that the pilgrim finds in what frustrates the tourist.”
Illustration by Hazel P. Mason
AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR, known for such roles as Hippolyta Freeman in the HBO series Lovecraft Country and Mama in The Color Purple (2023), approaches her acting as an artisan, searching for the right tools with which to craft her characters, she told Sojourners’ assistant editor Josina Guess this spring. Two recent films — Origin (2023) and Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024) — feature powerful performances by Ellis-Taylor and tap into her own yearning for a world in which justice and truth prevail.
Origin (written, produced, and directed by Ava DuVernay) is a biographical drama inspired by Pulitzer-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s process of writing Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). The film depicts a quest for the origins of why we separate ourselves from one another, even though it destroys us physically, spiritually, and politically. For her moving performance as Wilkerson, Ellis-Taylor traveled to Germany and India, tracing Wilkerson’s observations about the connected histories between Nazism, the caste system, and racism in the United States — deepening our understanding of these bitter human wounds.
Exhibiting Forgiveness is an autobiographical film written and directed by artist Titus Kaphar, whose process-oriented works on canvas, sculpture, and film reveal the layered reality between history and the present. In Exhibiting Forgiveness, an artist named Tarrell experiences rising success while haunted by flashbacks of a childhood riddled with addiction and family violence. Ellis-Taylor plays Joyce, the artist’s mother, who begs her son to forgive because “it’s what the Bible says.”
Both films invite viewers to wrestle with themes of reckoning and healing on a personal and societal level. Ellis-Taylor spoke with Guess about the lessons of Origin in this election year, what she sees as the “burdensome” work of Black forgiveness in the face of ongoing harm, and her commitment to speaking and living into truth, including embracing her queer identity while remaining in the Black church. —The Editors
Co-founders Aurora Conley (left) and Philomena Kebec (right) of Gwayakobimaadiziwin Bad River Harm Reduction in Northern Wisconsin at a community event. / Photos by Alison McKenzie, Illustrations by Eduardo Ramón Trejo
“WE ARE IN the midst of an overdose crisis,” said Hill Brown, southern director of Faith in Harm Reduction. “We say overdose crisis and not opioid crisis because right now overdose is the crisis. We’ve had opioids forever.”
In 2020 and 2021, during the height of deaths and extreme social isolation from COVID-19, deaths from overdoses surged in the United States before reaching a new baseline. The CDC estimates nearly 110,000 overdose deaths in the 12 months ending November 2023. That’s up from 71,350 deaths in the 12 months ending November 2019. Nearly 70 percent of these deaths were related to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. For people 35 to 64 years old, the overdose death rate was highest among Black men and American Indian/Native Alaskan men at around 60 per 100,000 persons. Overdoses have become the third largest cause of death among teens 14 to 18 years of age, behind firearm deaths and vehicle collisions, rising to an average of 22 per week in 2022, largely driven by fentanyl in counterfeit prescription pills.
While churches have long hosted recovery groups focused on abstinence from drugs, some faith leaders are exploring how churches and other religious institutions can serve people who use drugs (PWUDs). By offering safer drug use resources such as sterile syringes and smoking supplies, fentanyl test strips, safe consumption sites, naloxone (an overdose reversal drug) training, and counseling, they are also working to extend this welcome and compassion without moralizing about drug use or judging PWUDs.
Collectively known as harm reduction, these practices were originally envisioned as strategies to curtail the spread of HIV. In this context, harm reduction aims to reduce the negative consequences associated with drug use. Its values include viewing PWUDs as sacred and beloved, believing love is greater than the law, allowing PWUDs to exercise choice, and centering a person-first approach that embodies compassion, dignity, and justice.
Illustrations by Kalima Alain
I LIVE IN Rwanda, a beautiful East African country also called the Land of a Thousand Hills. We have a saying here: “When you are well, you belong to yourself, but when you are sick, you belong to your family.” But my first trip to the United States taught me that culture matters, particularly in the context of end-of-life care.
In a palliative care education and practice course at Harvard Medical School, I learned the principle of patient autonomy — that individuals have the ultimate authority to make decisions about their own health care. Patients are “in control.” But while shadowing my mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital, I noticed photos of family members in patients’ rooms. I remember asking, “Where are the people who are shown in the photographs?” I now know that this may be an attempt to recreate a family or to provide a last chance to reconnect with life, but all the people I saw in the pictures were alive — why were people trying to create an illusion of family when the family exists?
I asked my mentor, “How can we bring back those people from the photos to the room?”
Of course, I came with my bias and an African perspective on end-of-life care. Here, decision-making is based on patient autonomy and community responsibility, because one aspect does not exclude the other. There is synergy between them.
In Rwanda, there are no photos in the patient’s room. Instead, there are people.
M311Y Photography
THE LORD PLANTED a seed in my heart in 2013, when I was holding my baby girl at a conference and learned about the disparities and health outcomes for Black and brown women. I started Abide, a maternal justice organization [in Texas], to improve birth outcomes in communities with the lowest quality of care by offering services that are easily accessible, evidence-based, holistic, and free from judgment. I strongly believe this urge in my spirit is God-led. And God is saying that Black and brown birthing folk matter and are deserving of excellent care that centers them and honors their lived experiences.
master1305 / Shutterstock
ABOUT 12 YEARS AGO, I was a part of a group of clergy arrested for civil disobedience. After we were placed in a police van, we began to sing freedom songs like “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” I remember that any lingering anxiety I had dissipated as we sang. The experience of music interlaced with our march for justice filled our senses and left an imprint among all those who were arrested.
This points to a larger truth: Music wields undeniable power in human experience. Though I’ve met many people who dislike a particular genre of music, I have never met a person who disliked music itself. When experienced collectively, music unifies. The church knows this and has historically emphasized its importance. Whether songs are led by a single person on a pipe organ, an elaborate rock band with blazing stage lights, or a thunderous, brightly robed choir clapping on the two and four, the sonically healing nature of music can draw a church assembly together into a state of unified resonance.
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God’s creation operates according to rules — we call them physics and chemistry — and they are not to be trifled with. Right now, we’re trifling.
But right now — at the exact same moment — we’re also using chemistry and physics to do some remarkable things that could potentially repair some of that trifling.
We don’t know which will win. It will come down to biology — that is, to the rules that govern who we are in this created order.
The trifling first: The climate crisis is clicking into its highest gear yet. 2023 was the hottest year in the last 125,000, and the steamiest too, as the heat drives up the level of moisture in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere grew at their fastest pace ever, surging more than 4 parts per million. Ralph Keeling, the veteran scientist in charge of compiling the data, said, “Human activity has caused CO2 to rocket upwards. It makes me sad more than anything. It’s sad what we are doing.”
It should make us sad. Some humans — climate scientists, specifically — warned the rest of us humans about all this more than three decades ago, when we could have headed off much of it. We didn’t.
esfera / Shutterstock
POLITICAL SCIENTIST Thea Riofrancos has written extensively on the politics and economics of mining. “Extraction is a very old practice. We can say that it is as old as human history,” said Riofrancos in a Granta interview this year. With the rise of European empires in the 15th century, extraction led to conquest in search of valuable minerals. Conquest led to territorial occupation, consolidation of forced labor, and centralized foreign control over resources. And it is all still happening — now, on a planetary scale. This is why Pope Francis describes the Earth as the “new poor,” and thus as a locus of liberation.
The logics of extraction and occupation are entwined. Driven by economics, both view certain human lives, and any part of nature, as marketable and disposable by the cheapest means of violence and destruction. These logics thrive on the constant retraumatizing of the environment and of Black and brown bodies, to keep them compliant and prevent them from consolidating power. These are presented as necessary sacrifices for civilization to “advance.” Colonial laws remain in many post-colonial nations, and elite communities in those countries continue to benefit from resource control, perpetuating the violence and oppression of the colonial project.
In the age of climate collapse, these sinful logics come back to haunt us. For example, as the geographer Kenston Perry has highlighted, the Caribbean region has faced enormous losses from climate-induced natural disasters. This is a result of colonial systems that prioritized extractive plantation agriculture instead of protective ecosystems and disregarded Indigenous practices and knowledge of the environment. The fate of the poor, the marginalized, and those on the wrong side of western colonialism is inextricably tied up with the fate of the planet.
The environmental crises in Congo from mining and in Gaza from war provide two examples of how extraction and occupation are twin sins.
CSA-Archive / iStock
AS THEY GEARED up to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the soon-to-be rioters carefully chose their clothes, their flags, and their symbols to convey the message they wanted to send. That message, surprisingly, had a lot to do with Jesus.
One popular flag read “Jesus 2020.” Preachers and worship leaders arrayed around the Capitol “pleaded the blood of Jesus” while their compatriots shed the blood of Capitol Police officers. Indeed, at times the Capitol riot resembled a modern-day crusade, mayhem and suffering inflicted on the innocent under the sign of the cross.
I have spent the past three years searching out the leaders and theologies that galvanized Christians to show up that day. What I’ve found are networks of hardline Christian nationalists who have cobbled together a theology of power, domination, and privileged access. I call them “Christian supremacists,” because they are making moves to restructure society to privilege and elevate Christians over everyone else.
I wish I could say that these leaders were fringy, or better yet, not really Christians, but, if anything, Christian supremacy is spreading like wildfire in the American church, especially as we careen toward another polarized election.
The early church faced a similar problem: A group of early Christians called the gnostics believed that God gave special revelation to certain individuals, the spiritual elites. The gnostics disdained the more bodily and human dimensions of the biblical Jesus in favor of an enlightened, victorious Christ.
Maksim Manekin / iStock
One week this spring, my Instagram feed served up: A detail from a ground-breaking cellular-level map of a cubic millimeter of the human brain, showing a single neuron connected with more than 5,600 nerve fibers. The ebullient smile of a 9-month-old relative. And the lifeless, emaciated body of a child in Gaza. Awe. Joy. Horror. I keep thinking of them all.
We hold babies we love, stare into sparkling eyes, and can almost see the wonder of their becoming, the miracle of a brain building myriad connections in a split second. We study soft faces that carry the genetic whispers of ancestors known and unknown. We become acquainted with tiny beings who are also full, unique people, revealing themselves more every day. Christians believe humans are made in the image of God. But how often do we meditate on that radical miracle? Recall holding someone in your arms who is unable to care for themselves and is utterly vulnerable, and yet blooming with infinite potential. Imagine God holding us and seeing the same thing.
In our brief moments of connecting with God, are we able to glimpse what it’s like to live as if imago dei were true? To understand for even a fleeting moment that “in the image of” is, in divine grammar, a verb, not just a noun, the signal flow between created and Creator? We are not just autonomous identities to God, who invites us to hold all human beings in that nexus of tenderness, love, and mystery that a beloved child engenders in us.
Dame Cicely Saunders, a British American nurse, medical social worker, and physician, was a pioneer in palliative care techniques and founder in the 1960s of the modern hospice movement. / Illustration by Leah Kellaway
In Derek Walcott’s poem “Midsummer, Tobago” he recalls a “summer-sleeping house / drowsing through August.” At Sojourners we are savoring family vacations, relaxing, welcoming new babies — and telling stories about our history and our becoming.
Sojourners assistant editor Josina Guess interviewed actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor about her recent films Origin and Exhibiting Forgiveness. Their deep conversation releases transformative power, an example of what narrative theologian James McClendon Jr. called “biography as theology.” What happens when we wrestle for truth in our personal and social histories, and open that struggle to God? As “Living the Word” writer Raj Nadella warns, “distorted memories of the past may misdirect our future; they may cause us to miss the way God is leading.”
A pregnant inmate at Western Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center in Chicopee, Mass., poses for a portrait in the facility’s visiting area in 2014. / Dina Rudick / The Boston Globe via Getty Images
KADIJA CLIFTON LEARNED she was pregnant with her second child while being booked at a Maryland county jail. She had no idea that she was expecting. She was halfway through her pregnancy before she got her first ultrasound. On that day, two armed sheriffs escorted her to the medical facility with her wrists cuffed in front of her belly. A female correctional officer sat in the corner of the room while she was being examined. Clifton felt she had no privacy — “it was invasive and not fun at all.”
Clifton, who has been out for several years and is raising her son with her parents’ support, recalls that she spent the rest of her pregnancy in the county jail worrying about the health of her unborn child. She was already anxious about leaving her then 5-year-old daughter to be raised by her ex. The news of the pregnancy made things even more complicated.
“During those months I remember simply wanting a comfortable place to sit, versus plastic chairs or stools with no back support. I was seriously pregnant,” says Clifton. “Then there was the food, or lack of it. You have a limited amount. You get three meals a day, and if you are pregnant, it is just not enough.” Luckily, by the time Clifton was due, she was able to pay the bail bond and was awaiting trial at home.
I first met Clifton at a graduation ceremony in Alexandria, Va., for Together We Bake, a workforce training program. Clifton shared her life story in front of a handmade collage while hugging her then-5-year-old son. She had completed a 10-week training, learning about food safety, business administration, job readiness, and other critical life skills. Two months later, she became a senior adviser to a podcast on reentry I was producing at the time. Clifton now works as a night supervisor in a facility that hosts at-risk LGBTQI+ youth. Her daughter, now 14, still lives with her dad, but she and Clifton speak regularly.