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“IF PTSD RESULTS from being the prey—re-experiencing the feeling that something is hunting you, hurting you, trying to kill you—then moral injury results from being the predator—where you have done things to hurt people.

I hear moral injury when a veteran tells me, ‘If people knew what I had done ...’ or ‘I can’t walk into church.’ Sometimes it takes a form of humor, where people joke about not wanting to be around ‘holy stuff.’ In a story of St. Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier who is baptized and converts to Christianity, after he leaves the army to enter the monastery, he refuses to come to the altar, and he cowers in the corner.

FOR MUCH OF my life I thought of Lent primarily as a season of personal piety, a self-contained period of reflection on individual sin and repentance. This penitential practice was limited in both scope and duration: It had little to do with others apart from me and God, and its impact did not extend beyond Easter. I approached a central component of Lent—the fast—like a trial, a test of willpower that pitted God against some “thing” I had given up, often a food (usually cheese or dessert). Much to my chagrin, in this personal test of will, God did not always win out. Overall, I was grateful and relieved each year when Lent ended.

Two years ago, things changed. As a dairy and meat aficionado who unexpectedly found herself a convert to vegetarianism and pondering veganism, I suddenly had a new relationship with chosen fasts. (The cause: Eating Animals, a book on factory farms written by Jonathan Safran Foer, collaborating with Jewish ethicist Aaron Gross. Read at your own dietary risk.) Vegetarianism helped me engage fasting as something internally motivated by ethical and spiritual concerns, rather than externally imposed. Participating in my church’s annual Daniel Fast later that year deepened this new experiential understanding. Based on Daniel 1 and featuring weekly 12-hour periods with no food, this fast helped me experience how fasting is not about willpower, but surrender. It taught me about hubris, humility, and moment-by-moment reliance upon God, which often involved other people.

ON A COLD January day in 2010, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens felt so strongly about the dangers of corruption that he delivered a rare oral dissent in the Citizens United case. Decrying the majority’s “crabbed view of corruption” that focused on quid pro quo arrangements exclusively, Justice Stevens countered, “There are threats of corruption that are far more destructive to democratic society than the odd bribe. Yet the majority’s understanding of corruption would leave lawmakers impotent to address all but the most discrete abuses.”

In retrospect, the striking thing from that winter morning was not so much the existence of Steven’s oral dissent (though notable), but the basic agreement on all sides. No one on the court contested the idea that corruption poses a threat to “democratic society.” The majority and the minority simply split on whether the specific practice at issue constituted a form of corruption.

Ten years later, we cannot take the same presupposition for granted. Instead of identifying corruption as a danger to the republic, we are all too ready to treat it as an inescapable part of American life. Indeed, the rationalizations have now become as predictable as they are depressing: It may be distasteful, but both sides do it. It is a necessary evil. Get over it.

IN 2016, CANDIDATE Donald Trump vowed to halt “endless wars.” The Democratic candidates running for president this year have made similar promises.

Yet, following the drone-strike killing of Iran’s senior military commander in early January, more troops are going to the Middle East and military tensions have increased. U.S. forces continue to drop bombs and conduct combat operations in Afghanistan and other countries, as Washington’s propensity for military intervention shows little sign of abating. The power of the Pentagon has increased and will grow further in the years ahead as the 2020 military budget doubles down on money and weapons to wage war across the globe.

When most of us hear the term endless war, we think of Afghanistan. Rightly so, as the war is now in its 19th year, with no end in sight. For years we were told by political leaders, including President Obama, that the Afghanistan conflict was a legal and justified war, as opposed to the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Our persistent efforts, we were told, were paying off in countering terrorism and advancing democracy and human rights.

Now we know this was a lie. The release of the so-called Afghanistan Papers in December revealed systematic deception and failure. Based on 2,000 pages of confidential interviews with those who fought and directed the war, the Afghanistan Papers confirm that Pentagon and White House officials made claims of success they knew to be false and refused to admit the war was unwinnable.

IN THE EARLY days of Hollywood, Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) was an icon. In the context of racist U.S. policy and increasing nativism in Hollywood, he was arguably the first non-Caucasian actor to gain international fame and the first person of Asian descent to become a leading man in the movie industry.

His overall career, however, is a story of race’s shadowy relationship with success. Orientalism, Yellow Peril, and America’s fear of Japan both helped and hurt his career. The Catholic Church’s eventual oversight of Hollywood also played a part in his troubles. The only way Hayakawa thrived in the industry was by playing into the structures of racism that set up his stardom.

“Such roles are not true ...”

IN 1915, WITH actress Fannie Ward, Hayakawa had the first on-screen interracial kiss.

Well before the Motion Picture Production Code outlawed interracial romance in 1930, the silent film The Cheat (1915) shows Edith Hardy (Ward) as a wife who takes money from the Red Cross, loses the $10,000, and then struggles to repay her debt. As she reels from the news of her loss in a semiconscious state, an acquaintance, Hishuru Tori (Hayakawa), assaults her and steals a kiss before she comes to her senses.

The silent film continues as Hardy describes her debt to Tori. Tori writes a check from his exorbitant wealth—he is described by title cards as a Japanese ivory trader—but not for free. He expects something from Ward.

When Hardy goes to repay Tori after her husband makes a hefty return on an investment, Tori locks the door and assaults her a second time. He brands Hardy with a circular seal; after she falls to the ground, the camera focuses on the stark black mark on her white shoulder.

The branding scene caused uproar in the Japanese American community. A Japanese newspaper in Los Angeles denounced Hayakawa, his sinister character, and the character’s appearance as a harmful stereotype. (Hayakawa reportedly had asked Cecil B. DeMille, the director of The Cheat, to change the clothing and mannerisms of his character, but DeMille disregarded him.) The backlash was enough for the film to be re-released in 1918 with Hayakawa’s character changed to a “Burmese king,” presumably because the studio believed Burmese people would have less volume to their voices of dissent.

“Such roles are not true to our Japanese nature ... They are false and give people a wrong idea of us,” said Hayakawa in 1916. “I wish to make a characterization which shall reveal us as we really are.”

LAST FALL, I went on a 20-city book tour for my new book, Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus. I was deeply encouraged by the “new and needed conversations about Jesus,” as they were often called, that we had with diverse gatherings of thousands of people. Most events produced a public discussion on the meaning of faith and public life in America.

As a result of that tour and the national events that were unfolding alongside it, I came to three principal conclusions:

First, between the impeachment process and the upcoming election, we are facing a test of democracy.

Second, we are facing a test of faith in how religious communities respond to this moral, political, and constitutional crisis.

Third, a new generation is watching and will decide their future relationship to the faith community on the basis of that response.

Where were the voices of faith? This will be the question when people look back on this period in history, and that makes it an urgent question for all of us right now. That is the key question I will be asking as this new year unfolds. I have put my voice out there with the new book, to a deep response so far, and will continue to do that in the weeks and months ahead.

BEFORE SUNRISE, the Chicago Federation of Labor team hit the city streets in an SUV packed with fresh donuts and hot coffee. We were bringing encouragement to picketing Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Local 1 and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73 members. A cold front swept through on the first day of the Chicago public schools strike, which launched tens of thousands of public school teachers and school support staff into the streets in October, but it could not chill the fire for justice in the union members. They wanted something better not just for themselves but for the children they taught and cared for and the communities they came from.

Our first stop was Pulaski International School in Logan Square, home to nearly 900 students. The teachers and support staff were already on the sidewalks—wearing red for CTU and purple for SEIU 73. The teachers and staff at Pulaski identified class sizes and more prep time as key challenges.

We drove south to East Garfield Park, stopping at Westinghouse and Marshall high schools. Several NBA and NFL stars and other notable Chicagoans graduated from these schools. Sadly, during the strike, gunfire claimed the life of a Marshall student. Teachers and staff said more counselors and nurses were needed. Cardenas and Castellanos elementary schools also needed counselors. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have traumatized many of the children, who have seen relatives and classmates disappear.

One of the last schools we visited was Ida B. Wells Elementary in Bronzeville, where poverty is the school’s biggest challenge. Dozens of students showed up at the closed school because they had nowhere else to go and nothing to eat.

WHAT'S THE MOST generic, uninteresting building in your town? Probably the new bank branch, all brown brick with sterile “landscaping” in the parking lot.

And what’s the most dangerous building in your town? Probably the new bank branch, with its drive-through window and its smiling teller and its pens on chains.

Dangerous because if it’s connected to one of the big national banks—Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America—that branch is deeply enmeshed in the destruction of God’s creation that climate change represents. It’s taking your money and turning it into carbon.

Those four banks—the same ones that helped nearly bring down the world economy in 2008—are the main lenders to the fossil fuel industry. If you want to build a new gas pipeline, if you wish to frack a well, if you hope for a shiny new LNG port, all you have to do is apply and chances are you’ll get your cash. Consider Chase, which lends more than any bank on Earth to the fossil fuel industry. In the last three years it handed the industry $196 billion. For ultra-deep-sea drilling, for Arctic exploration—you name it. It’s single biggest energy client? TC Energy, which is still trying to punch the Keystone XL pipeline across the continent. Its lending has gone up—way, way up—since the Paris climate accords. If Exxon is a carbon giant, so is Chase.

TO ENTER THE main history galleries of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), you have to descend. A glass elevator carries you down through six centuries of history, dates written on walls like exposed strata in the earth. The past, we are reminded, lies not behind us but beneath us.

The weight of your passage and what lies ahead does not hit you until you step out of the elevator and emerge to the 1400s. You have arrived in a trans-Atlantic world as yet unmade, a geography not yet drawn by greed, suffering, and death. You will return to the surface and the present slowly, and only by walking the mile-and-a-half-long exhibition corridor on a winding route through slavery to an unsecured freedom.

No matter how many times I take this journey, it never becomes familiar.

The emotional shock of history is too great, contained in the thousands of everyday items on display: tiny, child-sized shackles; pieces of an excavated slave ship; an entire slave cabin, transplanted from South Carolina; a small silver box that held one man’s treasured possession, his free papers; Harriet Tubman’s lace shawl, given to her by Queen Victoria. Emmett Till’s casket.

NMAAHC, or the “Blacksonian,” as I like to call it, makes explicit what is sometimes only gestured to by other institutions: the sacredness of history.