Ariana DeNardo is the donor services assistant for Sojourners. In this role, she manages donor records and stewards the Sustainers Circle community.
Ari comes to us from the coast of Massachusetts as a recent graduate of Gordon College where she studied sociology and creative writing. During this time, she served as a peer writing tutor, a poetry editor of a student-run literary and arts magazine, and a dialogue facilitator. She rages regularly at the ways the world chokes itself, and is interested particularly in racial justice, LGBTQ rights, and environmental stewardship.
Ari enjoys scrawling in notebooks, farming, hymns, and black licorice. She is honored to be a part of the gutsy, delicate, redeeming work of the Sojourners movement.
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Sojourners Donor Spotlight: Barbara Clark
Barbara and husband Andrew at a prime bird-watching spot in Kerala, India. Photo via Barbara Clark
Influenced in her early 20s by the civil rights movement, Barbara learned about Sojourners during the time that she and her husband served in Tanzania with the Peace Corps. Experiences interacting with folks diverse in religious belief and race during this time profoundly influenced her understanding of faith and social justice. She shares that her life has been influenced by Catholics and Mennonites, pagans and Methodists, Anglicans, Quakers, Hindus, and Buddhists: “At the core, a lot of us on the planet are looking for the same thing: to get along with one another, to have enough to eat, [and] to be able to live with some measure of safety and security.”
Sojourners Donor Spotlight: James Tufenkian
James Tufenkian
I spoke with James Tufenkian, founder of Tufenkian Foundation which serves to promote social, economic, cultural and environment justice in Armenia as it recovers from its genocide. I asked him about his connection with Sojourners, and how his work and faith intersect.
Ariana Denardo (AD): How did you get connected with Sojourners, and why did you decide to become a donor?
James Tufenkian (JT): My brother, a retired pastor, and I were having a series of conversations about the involvement of the church in social issues. He mentioned Sojourners, so I visited the website, read the magazine, and got interested. I found Sojourners to be the best, maybe the only organization I know of that works on social justice as Christians living out Christ’s example. It was natural for me to want to support that in different ways, one of them being as a donor.
Community: Our Next Epiphenomenon
Image via zimmytws/Shutterstock
The universe is made up of 96 percent dark matter and energy, swirling with complexity — black holes, empty spaces, bad dreams, failed marriages, unknown territory, broken bowls and bruised shins and loneliness. And yet — look! — everything is still churning along. And in a way that can only be explained in the gut, these alarming dark things are perhaps the only things that have the tendency of bringing people together into community.
As Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche writes, “In community life we discover our own deepest wound and learn to accept it. So our rebirth can begin. It is from this very wound that we are born.”
Shore
Daybreak. Image courtesy PlusONE/shutterstock.com
After the monsoon, after work, I catch
you with your face in the hot laundry,
the syntax of spring held together by sap,
hanging wild and worried and crazy
in the lowest branch. In the ripe country,
salmon fold over the linens of the bay,
and I weep with you from the shore, embodied.
For still you feel the fell of dark, not day.