Opinion
Many conservative Christians consider faith groups through one lens: what they lack. This doesn’t serve our efforts to be good neighbors, however. We also must remember that people of other faiths are image bearers of the same God, and because God hasn’t left himself without witness in the world (Rom. 1:20), they are equipped and capable of showing loving-kindness. And here’s the profound and provocative challenge today — because Jesus is present in their stories, it’s about time the church got to know these stories and learned how to be a part of them too.
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Toni Morrison understood that belief and faith are substantial to the sustaining force of black folks navigating both slavery and post-slavery traumas.
Smoke billows during a fire in the Amazon rainforest, August 17, 2019. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino
What we need now is to #PrayfortheAmazon — to lament the devastation to the creatures and to our climate. We need to talk about the loss in our churches, singing and praying in community. Then we need to have the courage to mobilize and save what’s left of this beautiful world.
Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus says it all for me. Because of the moment we are now in, this book feels like the most important one I have ever done.
Roxana and Melvin, with their child Samantha, talk with an aid worker at the ECHOS center in Texas. REUTERS/Daniel Kramer
The Trump Administration has just taken its most consequential step to date to limit avenues to legal migration and permanent resident status in the United States.
Image: Julie Frankel
Sandra Cisneros and Erika Sanchez express joy when dicussing the messiness of being human.
Pen and ink hand-drawn map of Fort Monroe, Virginia, 1862, by Robert Knox Sneden. Wikimedia Commons.
Fear became slaveholder religion’s tool of control, inspiring millions of poor white families in the South to send sons to war and pray for victory, even as the white sons of plantation owners avoided combat. During Reconstruction, when black and white representatives worked together in Southern legislatures to guarantee public education for all people, many poor white children went to school for the first time; many poor white people received healthcare at Freedman’s Bureau hospitals. Still, their preachers told them to be afraid. Even when black power helped poor white people in measurable ways, slaveholder religion taught white people to fear shared power.
Kashmiri women shout pro-freedom slogans before offering the Eid-al-Adha prayers at a mosque during restrictions after the scrapping of the special constitutional status for Kashmir by the Indian government, in Srinagar, Aug. 12, 2019. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
In Narendra Modi’s India, an ominous new project is in progress. The recently instituted National Registry for Citizens (NRC) in Assam excludes almost 4 million from citizenship – effectively creating one of the largest groups of stateless people anywhere in the world. A majority of them are Muslims, and while those of other faiths can apply for reconsideration, Muslims cannot. Reports indicate plans to implement NRCs in other borderlands.
Bill Stringfellow’s declining health eventually had him leave New York and took him to Block Island. At one of the first speaking events I did as part of the early Sojourners, we met together at a conference on “radical discipleship” at Princeton Seminary. His voice was soft, and you had to incline your ears to hear him, but his biblical radicalism so powerfully resonated with me. I asked if we could talk and he suggested a walk around the Princeton campus – a walk that I will never forget. After our long walk, Bill said, “You should come visit on Block Island,” a place I had never heard of. So, I did, and “the island” as people here call it, has literally changed my life. Block Island became for me an almost monastic place for regular retreat and vacation, where the Bible and the newspaper are always held hand and hand.
Image via Ken Yellis
The crowded opening reception featured keynote remarks by Mark S. Massa, S.J., and Rev. Gardiner Shattuck about the story’s key figures, Daniel Berrigan, a Catholic priest, and William Stringfellow, a civil rights lawyer and lay Protestant theologian.
Screenshot from 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco' trailer / A24
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a film of operatic intensity, poetic emotion, political clarity, and a touch of magic realism.
Shocked and saddened citizens of El Paso, Texas paying their respects to the memorial wall created just outside the parking area for the Walmart store. August 8, 2019. Credit: Shutterstock.
“Amor Eterno,”or Eternal Love, was written in 1984 by the famed Mexican singer and song writer Juan Gabriel, or JuanGa, after his mother passed away. It has become a standard that is played at funerals, wakes, get-togethers, and even restaurants across the U.S., Mexico, and the world to remember family and loved ones who have passed away.
As we continue to enter deeper into the crisis of climate change, into the reality of human rights abuses and eruptions of violence happening not just here but all over the world, perhaps we need to take a different approach in our relationship to one another and our creature-relatives all over the earth.
Image via Heather Wilson
Yes, August 12, 2017 was a horrible day that should be named for its extreme and intolerable act of white nationalism, but people of color are navigating detrimental impacts of white supremacy every day, both personally and institutionally within our education, economic, and criminal legal systems.
70 U.S. healthcare organizations endorsed a report about public health and climate change.
Construction worker on the frame of the Empire State Building. 1929. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Shall Christ or Cain reign in our American civilization?
Image via REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez
Some Latinx people have known — and others have suspected — this land is not safe for us, but the extent to which that suspicion has been confirmed in El Paso is terrifying. The perpetrator in this massacre was deliberate in his plan to counter the “Hispanic invasion.” It’s tempting to believe all this has been incited by the current president’s violent rhetoric. But while that rhetoric has added much fuel to the fire, the fire has been burning for a long time.
I searched for other friends from that group. A few more had similar pictures. The reasoning for such firepower switches quickly and seamlessly between hunting and protection. My father, retreating further into radical, end times theology had given me a loaded pistol as a college graduation gift. I stayed with a friend of his after college, an older woman in her 60’s who stocked her home with so many canned goods, the place felt claustrophobic. She explained she wanted to be prepared for when the antichrist controlled the food supply. For she and my father, the war on God and country was never theoretical. The antichrist would work through legislation and technology just as much as by demonic force.
Sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter: Tallahassee, Florida Date: March 13, 1960
During the 110th National Convention of the NAACP in Detroit, Mich., thousands of delegates from the Youth & College Division attended. Convention enables moments of intentional innovation, erects bridges of generational understanding, forges highways of collaboration, paves paths of opportunity, and preserves the legacy of the ancestors.