Opinion
Baltimore, Maryland. Image via REUTERS/Stephanie Keith
While we shouldn’t be sucked into Trump’s sinister game of getting distracted by and responding to every outrageous and egregious tweet or statement, there is also a corrosive and malignant danger of remaining silent. If we are silent, the cancer of racism will become more and more acceptable and normalized, emboldening white nationalists and supremacists and leaving already vulnerable communities even more vulnerable.
Each of the 62 men in the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., are quite likely guilty of horrible crimes, and those crimes should have consequences. To be anti-death-penalty is not to be anti-victim or anti-justice. To be anti-death penalty is simply to insist that we can deal with violent crime without mirroring the violence and taking another life.
Screenshot from 'The Farewell' trailer / A24
The film challenges Western beliefs about familial and individual responsibility, as well as the often-unrecognized personal sacrifices we make for the ones we love.
Farmer-pastor Samuel Kinuthia tending to his crops. The maize is typically at waist height this time in May, in non-drought-ridden climates.
As the climate crisis intensifies and crystallizes, the tangible effects of climate change today are disproportionately dispersed on both the national and global scale. Communities and entire nations who do the least to contribute to rising greenhouse gas emissions bear the enormous burden of climate disaster first and worst on their bodies and their livelihoods.
Image via Mohammad Rakibul Hasan
Interestingly, the ambit of 'flashbulb memory' provides insight into cases where courts have failed to prosecute crimes of sexual violence — those hearings took place years after the actual event. In those years, memories we thought to be foolproof had deteriorated as survivors battled trauma, tragedy, and time. As testimonies were vetted for reliability, misconceptions around memory articulated through each step of the legal processn and increased the probability of a miscarriage of justice.
Image via Kayla Lattimore
When the U.S. Capitol Police issued three warnings for us to disperse, most of those gathered stepped back behind the police line, but five stepped forward and laid down in the shape of a cross in the center of the rotunda. A cross of human bodies. Dozens more formed a eucharistic circle around this cross.
Byron Widner played by actor Jamie Bell in Skin
This film tells the story of Bryon Widner's exit from white supremacy and how love redeemed his life.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at a news conference on human rights at the State Department in Washington, U.S., July 8, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
From July 16-18, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hosted the second annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, which is touted as the “the largest religious freedom event of its kind in the world.” More than a thousand attendees representing delegations from 106 countries arrived in Washington D.C. to discuss challenges to religious liberty and how to collectively address the threats facing people of faith worldwide.
Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash
Numerous reports, including Dana Milbank’s “President Trump actually is making us crazy,” have pointed out that since the 2016 election there has been an increase in mental health challenges including depression, stress, grief, anxiety, and sadness.
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
Though I was never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls, the engine driving me was the white savior complex. I thought the dark bodies living in the developing world needed us white, Western, Christians. The other Westerners I worked with believed we had it all pretty much figured out. We had the right theology. We had the right answers. We had the expertise. We were the so called “whole” condescending to help the “broken.”
YouTube / PBS Kids
A few days ago, I gathered with my two Potawatomi sons on our couch to watch Molly of Denali, a cartoon that recently premiered on PBS starring a young girl named Molly who is an Alaska Native (specifically, Gwich’in/Koyukon/Dena’ina Athabascan). This show is the first of its kind in the history of the United States.
Members of the theatre group Papel Machete perform during a protest calling for the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rossello in front of La Fortaleza in San Juan, Puerto Rico. July 21, 2019. REUTERS/Gabriella N. Baez
The water that gives life mixes
With the blood and the tears
From the gas, the bullets
Donald Trump’s tweeted and spoken racial assaults on the four members of Congress — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib — are a public sin that must be called out.
What I did not tell my friend, even as I thanked her, is that just as Christopher has become less churchy, so have the rest of us. I did not say that I’m not quite comfortable with religious jewelry in general, and in this case, don’t even wear the medal for safe passage. Instead, St. Christopher is a reminder of beautiful imperfection and radical acceptance — the patron saint of just right.
Two people hug at the site where Heather Heyer was killed on the one-year anniversary of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The president has used racism to spread his political agenda, and American Christendom has been an eager participant.
Image via REUTERS/Jonathan Drake
If we hear silence from white people of faith, we are in deep spiritual trouble. Christian moral objection to the president’s racist language must grow every day and from many quarters, but so farno word at all from the president’s most prominent evangelical supporters. Those Trump supporters have other issues and moral concerns, including differences with Democrats on abortion (as others of us do too); but will they call out the President on racism? That has now become an urgent moral and theological test.
Photo of Auschwitz by Albert Laurence on Unsplash
Though much of the trip was spent studying the past, at no point was the connection to present day more striking than when the group returned to their hotel after Auschwitz and turned on CNN. The news segment featured the detention centers along the U.S.-Mexico border and the deplorable conditions there.
How can someone who claims to stand on family values possibly support a policy of family separation that, in many cases, leaves no possibility for future reunification? How can someone who claims to follow a man who taught us to love our enemies possibly support an administration that refuses to provide children with basic necessities like soap, toothbrushes, or even a decent night’s sleep? It doesn’t add up, and it’s time Christians stood up and took notice because the religiously unaffiliated already have.
Photo by Filip Bunkens on Unsplash
The president of the United States has recently unleashed a barrage of racist and anti-immigrant tweets that are, in my opinion, in perfect alignment with who we have known him to be. While outrage is the appropriate societal response to such childish and harmful behavior, I do not believe that focusing our attention on tweets and xenophobic rhetoric is what will move us forward as a nation. What will move us forward as a nation is for everyone in this country to begin to understand the role that race plays in our white-dominated society, and the many ways in which most of us are complicit with this system of domination.
Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash
In some ways, that conversation continues to change as we work through issues of inequality. In a world in which the U.S. women’s team wins the World Cup, we still fight for equal pay, for recognition. In the church, it’s a constant uphill battle to get people to respect women as much as men, and while the conversation makes a lot of people uncomfortable, we are still having it. I wouldn’t know how to begin these conversations if I hadn’t encountered the leadership of women in the church.