Magazine
Illustration by Anita Rundles
RETIREES RICHARD AND LISA Starling are Georgia natives turned Cornell academics; their son Michael and his wife, Diane, are barely getting by in Texas; their son Thad and his boyfriend, Jake, live comfortably in Brooklyn. These family members voted for different candidates. Their experiences of religion range from solace to trauma, they have an unwritten list of topics they don’t discuss, and it takes tragedy and close confines to break open their surface-level peace and push them into the conversations they’ve been avoiding.
These characters appear in David James Poissant’s latest novel Lake Life, which is set in 2018 but explores family dynamics that feel especially relevant in 2020. Jen Hinst-White spoke with Poissant in late July, five months into COVID-19 social distancing, two months after George Floyd’s death and the resulting groundswell of protest, and three months before the national election.
Jen Hinst-White: You could have written a straightforward family drama, but your characters’ personal struggles also pull in big questions of theology, culture, and politics. Why?
David James Poissant: Those things grew important to me in my writing life because they’re important to me in my real life. I’m bad at acquaintanceships. As soon as I meet someone, I want to talk to them about God and their childhood and “Do you go to therapy?” I can’t write about family without writing about place, and I can’t help considering the politics and environment of the places I’m writing. Do these people believe in God, and in what way? And how do their beliefs affect their worldview? In an alternate universe, I’m probably a sociologist.
Illustration by Zharia Shinn
A FEW YEARS ago, an acquaintance and I found ourselves debating the value of art in a capitalist society—a suitably light topic for a summer evening. My companion believed strongly that art must explicitly denounce the world’s injustices, and if it did not, it was reinforcing exploitative systems. I, ever the aesthete, found this stance reasonably sound from a moral perspective but incredibly dubious otherwise.
Then, as now, I consider art’s greatest function to be its capacity for expanding our conceptions of reality, not simply acting as moralistic propaganda. After all, the foundational thing you learn in art history is that the first artists were mystics, healers, and spiritual interlocutors—not politicians.
We started making art, it seems, to cross the border between our world and one beyond. Prehistoric wall paintings of cows and lumpy carvings of fertility goddesses serve as the earliest indications of our species’ artistic inclinations, blurring the lines between religious ritual and art object. Even as the world crumbles around us, I am convinced we must hold onto art’s spiritual properties rather than succumbing to the allure of work that only addresses our current systems.
Police line up on the 101st consecutive night of protests against police violence and racial inequality in Portland, Oregon in September 2020. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs.
NONVIOLENT PEACEFORCE is an international nonprofit that works with communities facing violence to implement nonviolent strategies to help keep them safe. They have worked with communities around the world, including in Sri Lanka, Iraq, South Sudan, and Guatemala. Mel Duncan, Rosemary Kabaki, and Jessica Skelly of Nonviolent Peaceforce spoke in mid-September with Sojourners’ Betsy Shirley about their newest project location: the United States.
Sojourners: Why did you start projects here in the U.S. this fall?
Mel Duncan: We recognize that right now there are many indicators of looming violence, whether it be strife over police brutality and racism, or the chaos that is being stirred up around the election, or the catastrophic experiences we’re seeing with climate change—all of these can trigger violence.
What risks do you see?
Jessica Skelly: As we look toward the elections and beyond, we can see some indicators for flashpoints of violence—election tampering, delays in the election, perhaps continued police brutality, instigation by agents provocateurs—and people want to know how they can mobilize in responsible and constructive ways and help de-escalate some of that violence and protect themselves.
A voting booth inside a fire station in the Coral Gables neighborhood during the Democratic presidential primary election in Miami. March 17, 2020. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File photo
1. Get involved
Scenario: Voting places are closed, and mail-in ballots are restricted because there are too few election workers due to COVID-19 concerns.
Tip: Democracy is a team sport. Everyone can be an election worker. Commit a certain number of people from your church to register as poll workers and mobilize medical personnel to speak on coronavirus-safe voting practices. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission hosts a video explainer and training information for each state, and you can support efforts to recruit young poll workers through powerthepolls.org.
Illustration by Tyler Comrie
THE RIGHT TO VOTE, a foundation of our democracy and a fundamental attribute of citizenship, is under serious threat. In recent years, attacks on the integrity of the electoral system—the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, disinformation campaigns, foreign interference, and more—have weakened its overall infrastructure and cast doubt upon its results. Now we’re seeing repeated attempts, through propaganda and other means, to further undermine the system and discredit in advance the results of the 2020 election.
The president has attempted to co-opt real concerns about the upcoming election, claiming without evidence that it might be “stolen” as a result of fraud tied to vote-by-mail. His efforts deflect attention away from the ways that voter suppression efforts already underway pose a real danger, both to people seeking to exercise their hard-won right to vote and to the integrity of the electoral system itself.
As many have pointed out, there are numerous ways internal or external forces could call the results of the election into question: declaring a state of emergency that disrupts voting, delaying Election Day, interference by hostile foreign powers, tampering with voting machines or databases, and more. All of these represent legitimate threats, but perhaps the most likely scenario is that rampant voter suppression tactics impede enough voters in key battleground states to alter the presidential election outcome and which party controls Congress.
Incarcerated California firefighters, 2017, by Peter Bohler / Redux
Romarilyn Ralston spoke with Sojourners’ Jenna Barnett about her previous work for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection as a clerk and a trainer for other incarcerated wildfire fighters. In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill clearing the path for inmate firefighters to be eligible for firefighting jobs upon release.
“SINCE WORLD WAR II there have been labor camps in California training incarcerated people to help support Cal Fire on the outside. California has one of the highest fire seasons every year, and it’s getting hotter and hotter because of climate change. So having a workforce of hundreds of well-trained firefighters to cut lines and remove fuel on the sides of mountains for a dollar an hour—it’s a steal. And California saves $100 million a year doing it. On one hand, California is really progressive with our criminal justice reforms, and on the other hand, we’re still so committed to punishment and enslaving, extorting, and treating people inhumanely.
Illustration by Matt Chase
EARLIER THIS YEAR, Emancipation Memorial in my neighborhood of Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., became the target of national protests and calls for removal. Erected to great fanfare in 1876, the memorial is not a Confederate monument but an homage to Black freedom built with the hard-earned dollars of former slaves. It commemorates a sacred moment in Black history, but does so with the racist imagery—and thus fictive narrative—of Abraham Lincoln dominating a crouching, half-dressed, emancipated Black man.
I resented Emancipation Memorial each time I passed by it, but when the calls began for its removal, I faltered. Learning its history several years ago as a monument fundraised by formerly enslaved Black people forged for me feelings of connection to it, even as I recoiled at its imagery. The meaning of “home” it carried as the landmark naming my D.C. neighborhood and church intensified in light of these feelings. My complicated response led me to reflect on another structure close to home for me that has yet to be dismantled.
Illustration from photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash
RIGHT THERE ON page one, it explains that our job is to exercise careful dominion over the planet, which God has just made and found good. It’s literally job one.
So let’s just list a few of the things that have happened over the last four years in this country to see how we’re doing. The administration has, according to The New York Times:
Dramatically weakened the fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks; canceled a requirement that oil and gas companies even report their methane emissions, at precisely the moment that methane emissions (a key greenhouse gas) are soaring; weakened federal rules to prevent air pollution in national parks; withdrawn from the Paris climate accords, the only global effort to slow climate change; shrunk national monuments to allow for more oil drilling; pushed through plans for pipelines despite massive resistance from farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans in their path; permitted the use of seismic air guns for oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic, despite the danger to marine life that had led to a ban; opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (the largest wildlife refuge in the country) to oil and gas drilling; revoked Obama-era flood standards for new federal projects requiring that sea level rise be considered; reversed Obama-era rules on sport hunting so that it’s now legal to bait grizzly bears with grease-soaked doughnuts; revoked a rule preventing coal companies from dumping mining debris in streams; blocked plans to mandate more efficient light bulbs; stopped payments we’d promised to the Green Climate Fund, which is designed to help poor countries reduce carbon emissions; and restarted the sale of plastic bottles in national parks. Believe me, I could go on.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
MORE THAN A year ago, during the early days of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill protests, a Christian hymn echoed in the streets. “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord” had become an unofficial protest anthem. A year later, the spirit of hope that permeated the song’s adoption has evaporated.
This summer Beijing overrode the “one country, two systems” principle agreed to in 1997 by implementing a new national security law (NSL) in Hong Kong that gives China’s central government a broad set of powers to silence anything deemed subversive. The effects have been swift and chilling. In August, legislative elections for 2020 were delayed a year; pro-democracy candidates were disqualified. Controversial texts have been removed from public libraries, pro-democracy professors silenced, and newspaper offices raided.
Some of Hong Kong’s leading democracy activists, including legal scholar Benny Tai and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Joshua Wong, confess Christian faith. During the height of recent protests, many pastors invoked Christ in their participation. For example, pastor Roy Chan organized Protect the Children, a civilian peacekeeping collective, to shield young protesters from police violence. Under the new NSL, actions like Chan’s could be prosecutable, with potential life sentences.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
FOR ABOUT TWO decades I was part of a small, unaffiliated fundamentalist religious community in South Carolina. There I learned that Jesus’ condemnation of religious hypocrisy was a warning to adhere tightly to the church’s long list of superficial rules for holy conduct. It was a holiness defined more by rule compliance than goodness of heart.
Later, in college, I learned that Jesus was making an institutional critique more than an individual one in those biblical passages. He was in fact condemning a devotion to rigid rules that emphasized appearance over substance and venerating law while neglecting the soul.
Such beliefs are an apt metaphor for the fundamental defect in a near-century of U.S. police reform efforts. Most have ignored the heart and soul of our policing and carceral institutions; they have instead tinkered with these institutions’ appearances. Many of these reforms likely reduced some harms of U.S. policing. Yet, they have left largely in place the ideas and practices that taint the heart of American policing: Police techniques—even those blessed by law—maintain an anti-Black, gendered, heteronormative, and ableist status quo. As Christian faith teaches, mere adherence to rules is not holiness. As we learn by examining the limitations of police reform, reduction of harm is not justice.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
PEOPLE OFFER MANY reasons for not voting, from “one vote doesn’t matter” and “there’s no real difference between the parties” to the conviction that an election “won’t bring about real justice (or the reign of God).”
The latter, at least, is certainly true. Voting—even electing the best-available candidates for the most important positions in government—definitely won’t bring about the peaceable kingdom.
But who is ultimately elected—especially at the presidential level—can make a world of difference in the lives of those in the most vulnerable conditions. For instance, in the past three-plus years, more than 200 judges have been appointed to the bench, many of them to lifetime terms. Of that number, zero have been Black. And judicial appointment is only one of many powers in executive hands, which affect everything from education, housing, and immigration policies to whether our society makes the hard choices of confronting racialized policing and combating climate change.
Illustration by Jackson Joyce
WHO WOULD HAVE thought that a verse from the first chapter of the Bible would become an “altar call” for a presidential election? Here is our call to faith as we look to Nov. 3: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.’ ... So God created humankind in [God’s] image” (Genesis 1:26-27).
I believe this text about the creation of humankind in God’s likeness is the foundation of politics for people of faith. It means how we treat other human beings, including our fellow citizens, is a theological matter and not just a political one. Mistreatment of our fellow human beings and citizens is also not just a political problem but an offense to the image of God, an assault on imago dei.
Protecting the image of God in the upcoming election means protecting the voting rights of Americans of color, whose votes some are trying to suppress, deliberately and strategically. The faith community is responding.
Illustration by Matt Chase
FOR NEARLY 50 years, Sojourners magazine has taken bold, prophetic stands to fulfill its mission—to articulate the biblical call to racial and social justice, life and peace, and environmental stewardship—by telling stories that uncover injustice and offer solutions. I’ve been drawn to this mission since I was a college student studying journalism in the mid-aughts, and I am honored to be in a position to help build on that rich tradition as Sojourners’ new editor-in-chief.
In August, we revised our policies and procedures to strengthen our editorial independence and renewed our commitment to journalism that “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable" (for more on that change, click here). Amid a racial-injustice reckoning and the most consequential presidential election of my lifetime, this commitment to the Christian mandate of truth-telling drives our work.
OUR AUGUST 2020 article “Harboring a Culture of Hate,” by Catholic scholar-activist Eric Martin, contended that since the U.S. Catholic bishops did not explicitly condemn the Confederate flag as a symbol of hate—the bishops’ committee said “some still claim it as a sign of heritage”—some Catholics believe it is acceptable to be both Catholic and a member of white supremacist movements. Some Catholic officials and laypeople called the article misleading, saying it unfairly downplayed the institutional church’s other important anti-racist work, and Sojourners’ president Jim Wallis, who was then also editor-in-chief of our publications, decided to remove the article from our website.
Two weeks later, after some of the most intense and voluminous reaction in our publishing history, we issued a correction and reposted the article—and we’ve made some significant structural changes as well, instituting new policies that establish editorial independence from our organizing work (our new editor-in-chief Sandi Villarreal explains the importance of editorial independence). We’ve received hundreds of responses from our readers—including ordained and lay Catholic leaders, journalists, scholars, and activists—a sampling of which is below. As always, we appreciate your honest and passionate engagement, and we promise to keep listening.
FOLLOWING JESUS IS a mindset, a way of thinking as much as a way of being. In fact, one is not able to “be” a Christian without having a “change of mind,” a metanoia, the Greek word used in the New Testament for “repentance.” This change of mind or repentance, however, does not come from debates or argument. Rather, becoming like Christ is trying to figure out what it means to be one of his followers. “Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart,” says the “Negro” spiritual. Depending on the version, the songwriter chooses to “be more loving,” “be more holy,” and “be like Jesus” for the verses that follow.
It may be fitting that we do not know who wrote this song or where it originates, except from the hardscrabble lives of enslaved people in the U.S. Imagine with me what it might have been like to sing these words under such suffering and brutal conditions in order to uphold a horrific system. But instead of reflecting passive acceptance, these words might have been a means to shore up enslaved persons’ souls so they could live antithetically to that system. It certainly works that way for me, in the face of death-dealing encounters and events. This month’s texts give us an opportunity to not only sing this song, but to meditate on it and do our best to practice it. Maybe we will become more Christian in our hearts and in our actions. We will have to want it.
October 4
Sharing in the Suffering
Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Psalm 19; Philippians 3:4-14; Matthew 21:33-46
WHAT DOES IT mean to share in Christ’s suffering? I’ve bandied this question around in my mind for some time as I have pondered the Philippians text. Paul, of course, had shared in persecuting early believers before he became a convert himself. Trying to make sense and meaning of that suffering and people’s losses must have been a constant project for those trying to encourage the early church. Here, Paul takes on what it has meant to “lose everything.” His pedigree is impeccable; his credentials unassailable; his attendance to the law, meticulous. And yet, none of that matters to him after he committed to “knowing Christ Jesus” (verse 8). Those things—status and power—are on the trash heap as far as he is concerned. But what comes in its stead is suffering, even as he longs to “know Christ and the power of his resurrection” (verse 10). For Paul, you can’t get to the power of the resurrection without sharing in Christ’s suffering. But what does that mean?
Illustration by Jia Sung
Call this hair crazy.
but watch as it grows
outside of your gates
and beyond the walls
you’ve made to contain
me. See as it reaches
higher than anything you
ever thought of me,
shedding every lie of
inferiority.
Illustration by Matt Chinworth
EACH OF THESE reflections was written separately, not taking the others into consideration while writing each one. But as I reread them, there is a thread here. It is the thread of what it means to live faithfully together; what it means to do right by one another. Reflecting on love, accountability, economic justice, and what it means to have a righteous mind, I found myself thinking of each text in communal ways, rather than the ways I confess to typically having thought of them: “What do they mean for me, the individual?”
I am more struck by the selfishness I see, in these extraordinary times, when some people flat out refuse to do anything that they believe infringes on their individual rights. I believe that as followers of Jesus we are charged—called—to go beyond ourselves, even if we are socialized differently in our cultures or families. In addition, it is easy to settle into devotions that do not look beyond our own spiritual growth. But in these reflections, I have pushed myself to think about what it means to take in a larger view, to extend personal spiritual growth into the community. In some ways I am trying to reflect the Zulu concept of ubuntu, which indicates that a person is only human in relation to other humans. For me, by necessity, that means we must reach beyond ourselves. I hope these reflections will take you to that kind of humanity which, I believe, will deepen your faith in Christ.
September 6
The Love Debt
Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 149; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20
“LOVE” IS A landmine word. It has come to mean expressions of sappy, gooey sentimentality. Because of this expectation, requiring the hard “verb” of love as a Christian commitment often gets dismissed. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8). Every bit of the Romans text requires something more than good feelings. It calls us to examine our Christian debt. To “do no wrong” in a world where wrong stalks so many means we have to figure out how to “right the wrong.” What can it mean to “owe no one anything but love” when this nation robbed Indigenous Peoples of land and livelihood? It would be easy to say, “That was so long ago,” except the effects of that robbery extend into our present time.
It’s easy enough to name the damage, but how do we repair it? What does it mean to say, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor” (verse 10), when our trans siblings are being murdered and dismembered (as in the case of Dominique Fells in Philadelphia)? How do we provide safety? What does “Love your neighbor as yourself” (verse 9) mean in this Black Lives Matter moment of our culture, as we grapple with centuries-old sin against Black humanity? If we in fact owe one another love, then we owe one another justice, which includes repairing the damages done, individually and collectively, in community. It literally means reparation. It means doing so with an urgency, if we in fact believe “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers” (verse 11). For some, longing for Christ’s return can be an invitation to ignore the pain of now; but for me, it is the exact opposite. We are called to live honorably, which means to love righteously by “putting Christ on” (verse 14) and being the active love of God in the world by our deeds. Otherwise, it is not love.
Illustration by Ken Davis
WHILE DESPERATELY PERUSING the news for anything not related to the coronavirus, or the economy, or the fact that we have one last chance to save our democracy—you know, the boring stuff—I read that NASA will be making a movie on the International Space Station, featuring Tom Cruise. The $150 billion laboratory orbits about 250 miles above the Earth, which is 250 miles farther than was necessary to achieve its principle scientific discovery: Camping in space is expensive.
I could have told them that.
If there were justice in this world, Tom Cruise would instead be making a movie at the Superconducting Super Collider, a much less costly project that could have produced innumerable scientific breakthroughs in physics. Plus, its site in north-central Texas is well known for its ample gravity and breathable air. But Congress canceled it mid-construction in 1993, and the U.S. instead spent more than 10 times as much on the space station.
The collider was my fave project in the 1980s. You want breakthroughs in understanding how our physical world came to be—I used to say at parties—you go with the collider. You want to watch an astronaut drink upside down—I would add, ruefully, at that same party—then the space station is your boondoggle of choice.
But since I lobbied for the project mainly at parties instead of, say, congressional budget hearings, we’re stuck with the space station. (Too late I realized my considerable influence was directed at the wrong people, just because they had beer.)
Fortress Press
THIS IS NOT merely a survivor’s memoir; it is a grab-your-Bible-and-learn book; it is a love letter to God and the author’s queer family. In her prologue, “Lost,” Emmy Kegler sets out her agenda: “I want to tell you about the lost chapter of the Bible, the one with the story of a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep behind and goes out looking for the one that is lost. The one with the story of a woman who sweeps her entire house looking for the one coin that is lost. The one with the lost son who wanders from home and a lost son who stays and stews in his resentment and a lost father struggling to unite his broken family.”
In her first of many footnotes, Kegler identifies Luke 15:1-32 as that “lost” chapter. She spends the rest of her book conveying God’s expansive love for all who are deemed lost.
Kegler focuses on details of her story, about how bewildering it was to discover she was gay during the AIDS pandemic, in the year after Matthew Shepard’s murder. She observes, “Perhaps this is why I was fascinated by Jesus’ death: I saw the experience of my own people reflected in it.” In another chapter, Kegler recounts the pain of attending a church youth group for two years, with the leadership ultimately asking her to “pray the sinner’s prayer” when she revealed her sexual orientation.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
WHILE THE CLIMATE crisis has reconfigured our relationships with each other, other creatures, and our places, fiction has not. It remains focused on the human’s internal, moral journey, as if human life is something circumscribed from the rest of creaturely life. Gun Island is a much-needed antidote to the anthropocentric ideal of the novel, one that meets the age of climate change with stories that are true to the new dimensions of relationships unfolding around us.
In his first novel since his nonfiction masterpiece The Great Derangement, in which he laid out a vision for a climate-changed literature, Ghosh illustrates the agency of nature: how in this Anthropocene age, shaped by human activity, our porous lives are intertwined with those of our nonhuman interlocutors, who become increasingly present in our lives through climate-change-driven typhoons, fires, and species migration. He tells a story of stories, not recasting the tales of modernity, but reaching back into Bengali folklore to guide us through this uncanny age. For, as one of Gun Island’s characters says, “Only through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us.”