Opinion
While Rethinking Sex maintains a nearly secular perspective throughout, toward the end of the book she draws on 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas’ definition of love, which is that we should be “willing the good of the other” and creating goodwill in our relationships and interactions with other people.
The mole is a blind animal that is never seen but can hear very much and has a current sensitivity to the sounds surrounding it. Via Unsplash.
There are two common responses to climate fear in light of our planet’s alarming trajectory. One is escapism, which manifests as a selfish naivety that embraces a future hope of heavenly bliss and ignores the destruction around us. The other is despair, or an inability to see beyond our current disaster. I’d like to suggest a third response: an active, paradisiacal hope that doesn’t disconnect from the present world, but instead meets our planetary problems head-on.
A beekeeper holds frame with honeycomb. Photo: Vaivirga / Alamy
I wish I could say that my journey into beekeeping began in some profound manner, especially as a person who has spent years working on policies that impact the environment and food security. But the truth is that I started playing The Sims 4 to keep myself entertained during the pandemic, and the game had a beekeeping feature. As I played, I thought, “I can do this.” And that is how my beekeeping journey began.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs the “Parental Rights in Education” bill surrounded by supporters and school children. Photo credit TNS/ABACA via Reuters.
Recently, Florida House Bill 1557, more commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” was signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Speaking from a podium adorned with the slogan “Protect Children, Support Parents” DeSantis, a Catholic, wasted no time vilifying the bill’s critics as sexual indoctrinators. He was hardly the first to do so. During the initial backlash to the legislation, Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ press secretary tweeted from her personal Twitter account that opponents of H.B. 1557 were probably sexual groomers: “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year-old children.”
A fresco depicting Jesus appearing to the apostle Thomas, who touches his side. Photo: Emanuel Tanjala / Alamy
So when I read about people like Katie, one of many affirming parents who are leaving Texas because of the threat of having their transgender child taken from them, I think of the way the women at the tomb fled in fear. And when I hear Maddie, a trans girl in North Carolina, say, “If I didn’t have my hormones or my [puberty] blocker, I’d be very unhappy, and I wouldn’t want to leave the house sometimes,” I think of the disciples with the door locked on Easter evening.
IRS Tax Form 1040. Via Alamy.
On the IRS Form 1040, there is a section titled “Third Party Designee” which asks, “Do you want to allow another person to discuss this return with the IRS?” When filling out my 1040 for 2021, I simply wrote, “Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe.” This is what people mean when they say, “let go and let God,” right?
Pilgrims coming to light a candle in front of the cross. Photo: Adam Ján Figeľ / Alamy
Many of the white evangelical churches I have visited and grew up in framed Good Friday as a celebration. I have attended services that centered around dramatic skits or clips of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in order to evoke an emotional response. Another service treated Good Friday like a visitation where congregants were encouraged to reflect on their “friend Jesus” and share words of gratitude.
Christian pilgrims kneel and pray with a cross on Good Friday in 2015 on the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus carried his cross to his crucifixion, in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo: Debbie Hill/ UPI / Alamy
So as we move through Holy Week, I want to offer a prayer that pauses at each step along Jesus’ journey, from his agony in the garden to the triumphant joy of Easter. As we anticipate Christ’s ultimate victory over sin, death, and injustice on our behalf, let us find the courage to linger in the uncertainty, the suffering, and sacrifice that builds up to the glory of the resurrection.
People pass an offering plate during a church service. Photo credit: Bob Daemmrich via Reuters.
I admit that if you catch me on a bad day, I might join the chorus demanding that the government take aggressive action. As a former Catholic, I often contemplate how the law may have helped the Catholic Church hide its crimes against children. But in an effort to find some common ground, my position simply is that religious institutions should have to earn the exemptions in the same way that secular nonprofits do. This means that they would have to show how much money they bring in and how they spend it.
Image of the Bible opened to the book of Job. Photo credit: Christiane Lois Dating via Reuters.
Through reclaiming missing stories and telling our own stories in terms that undermine dominant narratives, we affirm our humanity and agency, our ability to resist and interpret our lives as meaningful. We must theologically interrogate the way we tell stories and the temptation to censor marginalized people’s perspectives and histories in favor of a dominant narrative. This is because stories cut to the heart of how humans, created in the image of God, make meaning out of what happens to us.
A matador and a bull face off.
Do you ever just need a win? Have you ever just had the blues of the world hit you, causing you to stop and think to yourself, “I need something good right now or I’m gonna lose it”? Where do you normally turn? Perhaps you go outside, maybe you talk with some friends, or maybe you find comfort in literature and movies. These are better attempts to find some modicum of happiness than to look where I normally look: The world of sports.
Photo by Rachel Wisniewski, Reuters
This spring marks one year after mass shootings in Atlanta and Indianapolis killed Korean, Chinese, and Sikh Americans. In the year since, 1 in 5 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) nationwide have experienced a hate incident. I grieve over this nation’s racism.
Amazon worker wearing a shirt that reads "Amazon Labor Union." Photo credit to Brendan McDermid. Image via Reuters.
Corporations, politicians, and other monied interests are often trying to find ways to derail organizing. The failed Amazon union drive back in April 2021 is certainly a notable example of this. Yet as labor scholar and activist Jane McAlevey points out, it’s also true that the reason the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union failed in Bessmer, Ala., was because they didn’t organize and incorporate support from local faith communities. McAlevey writes, “The media often played up the faith-based aspect of the campaign, with key staff of the effort being faith leaders or people of faith themselves. But there was a near-total absence of Bessemer or local Birmingham faith organizations on the endorsement list of the campaign.”
An United States of America flag stands next to a pulpit. By Joshua Eckstein via Unsplash.
In Keeping Faith, philosopher Cornel West explains that our investment of “existential capital” in the nation-state leaves us with “a profound, even gut-level, commitment to some of the illusions of the present epoch.” We experience amnesia when we allow our nation’s myths to be the foundation of our current reality.
Police cars explode in the film Ambulance, in theaters April 8. Screengrab via Universal Pictures.
Copaganda refers to any piece of media that portrays police as a necessary social institution. While this can include viral videos of police chatting with neighborhood kids or doing lip-sync battles, the most pervasive examples of copaganda are found in pop culture.
Supreme Court Justice nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies on the second day of her nomination hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary panel in Washington DC. on March 22, 2022. Photo credit: Patsy Lynch/MediaPunch via Reuters.
Hawley's accusation that Jackson is soft on crime reveals a troubling perspective on people who enact harm. Hawley is one of several Republican senators who sorts the world into two types of people: People who are evil and, if given the chance, will commit horrific, reprehensible crimes over and over again, and people like the rest of us, people who need to be protected from the evil people. According to this line of thinking, ensuring this protection shouldn’t rule out the harshest measures of isolation and punishment the state can enact. We separate “them” from “us” by forever marking them as dangerous.
Andie Myers wears a facemask with a transgender pride flag at the Women’s Ivy League Swimming and Diving Championships at Harvard University on Feb. 19, 2022. Photo: Paul Rutherford-USA TODAY Sports
March 31 marks the annual International Transgender Day of Visibility. I will confess that I only recently became aware of this day, which is “dedicated to celebrating the accomplishments of transgender and gender nonconforming people while raising awareness of the work that still needs to be done to achieve trans justice,” as GLSEN, an organization that advocates for LGTBQ issues in K-12 education, puts it.
Svetlana Yancheva and Michael Fleming in 'Fear'
The Bulgarian town where director Ivaylo Hristov’s latest film takes place is never named, but the movie’s title offers a suitable stand-in: Fear. This coastal village on Turkey’s border reeks of terror, but not the kind one might expect.
Blue broken plate on a blue background. Photo credit: Natalia Kokhanova / Alamy. Image via Reuters.
As Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann has reflected, the imprecatory psalms put words to our thirst for vengeance. In praying these psalms, we process our rage and give our violent impulses over to God. “O God, break the teeth in their mouths,” one psalmist prays; “let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime” (Psalm 58:6, 8). I’m all for this kind of prayer. I’m all for praying the entire range of the psalms — even the ones that sometimes make us uncomfortable or aren’t necessarily welcome in church. And if there is any occasion for an imprecatory psalm, certainly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in all of its brutality and sheer horror, is one of those occasions.
Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash
March is the most underrated month. In it, winter makes room for spring in a million miraculous ways. These changes are imperceptible unless you slow down and pay attention.