Lindsey Paris-Lopez is editor-in-chief at the Raven Foundation, where she uses mimetic theory to provide social commentary on religion, politics, and pop culture.
Posts By This Author
Can America Ever Be?
Her actions cry, “Give me your oil, your gold,
Your riches are my rightful destiny!
But keep your desperate people, young and old,
They’ve no right to a future within me!”
Love Dissolves Borders: A Prayer for Immigrants
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Rally in Times Square, New York City on Feb. 18, 2017. a katz / Shutterstock.com
If we don’t see you
In the mother pulled away from her child
In the father dragged from his home
In the child shivering in the detention center
Then we don’t see you at all.
Will We Keep Our Houses of Worship Gun-Free?
This is the hope of the life that never fades away, the life that extinguishes division and death. It is the life to which love has called us, which we must live out in daily acts of mercy and reconciliation. Rejecting the gun is the least we can do. There is no room in this life for instruments of death.
Dear Congress, the American Health Care Act Is Heartless
Pollution, poverty, and war take their toll on our health in ways beyond our control, and yet health care in our nation is still treated as a commodity for those who can afford it, rather than as a right for all. It is unthinkable that our nation can build pipelines that poison clean drinking water but expect citizens to suffer without affordable treatment due to lead exposure. It is unacceptable that some communities are trapped in cycles of poverty through discrimination often born of racism but cannot afford the medicine they need because their money must go to cheap, often less-nutritious food. And while it is unconscionable that our nation spends more on destroying lives abroad than it does on saving lives at home, the damage from war exceeds mere monetary cost. Investing in fighting an enemy abroad fuels enmity and distrust at home, putting undo stress on us and eroding our sense of compassion.
Are We Really Ready for New Life in Christ?
On the Monday after Easter, as the state of Arkansas fought a stay of execution for seven prisoners in order to put them to death, I meditated on a simple truth: When people are executed, Christ is crucified all over again.
The Hope in Sesame Street’s New Autistic Character
The purpose of the episode is not merely to introduce an autistic character, but to show how people with differing abilities can become friends. Sesame Street gently demonstrates the patience and empathy that make up the building blocks of any healthy relationship. It deftly navigates the misimpressions neurotypical children might have when they encounter an autistic person for the first time and shows that a little understanding goes a long way toward making a lifelong friend. When Big Bird first encounters Julia, he mistakes her unresponsiveness to him as a personal dismissal. He must learn that she takes her time answering, particularly when she’s deep in concentration on another activity. While he notices that she does things differently, he soon comes to realize that Julia’s way to play can be a lot of fun.
Trump’s Budget Devalues Life
We are awakening now to at least some of the consequences of devoting our dollars toward death. As we contemplate the toll that endless war is taking on education, the environment, housing, and healthcare, may our hearts expand in empathy — not only to our immediate neighbors, but to our neighbors around the world. None of us can afford to lose any more.
Where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. Let us invest our treasure in building one another up — here, and around the world — that we may mend our hearts and resurrect our humanity.
A Spirit of Enmity Is Destroying Us. Loving Our ‘Enemies’ Will Save Us.
“Love your enemies.” I’m reflecting on this, the hardest of Jesus’ commandments, as I grieve my own nation’s policies of war, exclusion, vengeance, and cruelty — policies envisioned through the lens of enmity. The lens of enmity warps our vision, inverting it so that the outside world is obscured by our inward fears. It contorts the human faces in front of us into monsters. It magnifies our own pain and obstructs that of others. It blinds us with lies.
The Sermon on the Mount: A Theology of Resistance
Suffering far outlasts any administration, and our commitment to the needs of those suffering must transcend partisanship. One problem with connecting advocacy to partisan political outrage is that often the needs of the people get lost in the desire to “win.” Jesus’s vision of healing a world in pain begins with blessing, not blame, so that we may keep our focus on those in need of comfort.
Gratitude in Darkness: Seeing Christ at Standing Rock
This Thanksgiving, I am struggling to be thankful in an angry, fearful, pain-filled world. The words of the liturgy suddenly pierce my consciousness: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and after giving thanks, he broke it …”
After giving thanks?
How do you give thanks on a night when imminent death is staring you in the face?
Down Ballot: What It Means to Vote for Life
All over the nation, stress levels are in the stratosphere as the election season comes to its frantic conclusion. The choice for president feels like life and death to many of us, and may indeed affect our lives in profound ways. But certain votes will have a direct impact on whether others live or die. If you live in California, Nebraska, or Oklahoma, you have a chance to vote for life, human dignity, and redemption by rejecting the death penalty.
Bound in Love: Lessons from Standing Rock
Now is not the time for fracking oil – a pipeline destined to leak, another broken treaty, or further racist, heartless disregard for a people who have already suffered unconscionable cruelties. Now is the time for intensive care for a dying world. It is also a time for reparations – to the indigenous tribes of this land, to African Americans, and to all those around the world on the receiving end of our violence. By reparations, I mean not just compensation, but real healing of relationships. War, arrogance and greed have pulled us all to the brink of destruction, and only cooperation, humility and generosity can save us.
This Ramadan, Let's Fast Together For a Better World
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Image via oneinchpunch/Shutterstock.com
Joining with Muslims, we can dare to make another impossibility possible: While Muslims fast from food and water, I call upon our government to fast from drones and bombs, from night raids and occupations, from violence of all kinds. During these days when Muslims give of themselves to show solidarity with the poor and vulnerable, let us have the courage to see the faces of the victims of our violence — those who have lost limbs and loved ones to the greed and megalomania of the powers that be, those who live in fear under the drone of drones, those displaced, those deprived of food for even longer than 19 hours a day.
Changing Our Mindset, Forever, About War
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Image via timquo/Shutterstock.com
We should have no fear of making an apology, which is the outward symbol of an inward change of heart acknowledging and renouncing our violence. We should apologize not only in Hiroshima, but in Nagasaki, Vietnam, Fallujah, Kunduz — around the world, and upon our own shores, with reparations to Native and African Americans.
Why We Must Apologize to Hiroshima
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Image via chuugo/Shutterstock.com
Confessing our own violence would not deny violence committed against us. Rather, an apology could call attention to war atrocities of the past and present on all sides. Admitting that the deadliest bombings in history had selfish strategic motivations, admitting that life was so thoroughly devalued and destroyed for no greater good (as if a greater good could exist) could force people on all sides to rethink the “necessities” of other wars past and present. Debunking one war lie could lead to the debunking of many war lies. And governments built on violence, powers upheld and strengthened by the looming threat of death, seek to extinguish the light of truth.
In Remembrance of Me
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Stained glass window depicting Jesus and the apostles at the Last Supper in the cathedral of Brussels. by jorisvo / Shutterstock.com
I am this broken and bleeding world.
I am Brussels, blown apart, the strewn limbs, the piercing wail of a mother for her baby.
I am Yemen, at the marketplace, charred bodies of children face-down in the dust.
I am Syria, families cramming into boats as guns and missiles chase them from the shore.
I am Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, pockmarked by bomb blasts, orphaned children hiding away from clear blue skies.
I am the growling of empty bellies drowned by the sound of gold pouring into the bottomless coffers of the war machines as they devour their sustenance and spit out death in return.
I am generation upon generation of silenced and vanished victim buried in the ground and trampled.
I am slain from the foundation of the world.
Let Us Know You Are Wheaton By Your Love
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Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, Stevan Sheets / Flickr.com
What is revealed to the world at the Epiphany in the Incarnation is that God’s language to the world is embodied Love. Jesus, whom Muslims revere as a prophet, is the message of God’s love for those who were previously deemed beyond love’s boundaries. What Jesus reveals through his life, death, and resurrection is that it is we humans who cast out, and God who draws in. God’s love excludes no one. Jesus is God’s revelation that Love has no boundaries.
The Urgency of Joy
![Alexey Losevich / Shutterstock.com Alexey Losevich / Shutterstock.com](https://sojo.net/sites/default/files/styles/large_square/public/blog/shutterstock_126318782_edit.jpg?itok=UYi8_gOW)
Photo via Alexey Losevich / Shutterstock.com
The phrase has captivated my imagination for some time now, as I seek joy in the midst of a world crying out in pain. In a nation of mass shootings and executions, in a world devastated by war crimes and the crime of war, where working for peace means learning the depths and pervasiveness of violence, despair threatens to seep in through the air I breathe. Hope often evades my grasp, and fear like a weight drags down my every movement.
But when I find myself in a morass of bitterness, my soul gets a jolt of energy from my laughing toddler, or the accidentally insightful comment from my precocious 6-year-old, or the warm hand of my husband on my shoulder. I savor the comfort of these gestures and let them lift me out of my cynicism. And as the tears clouding my vision disperse, I remind myself that joy, too, permeates the world and can be found by those with eyes to see it.
Hold On Until Love Wins
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Image via LoloStock/Shutterstock
We have nurtured an enemy mentality that pits us against the world — even as we justify it by claiming to be a force for protection of the world. And the violence we export abroad is taking its toll on us. It’s been taking its toll on us for a long, long time — eroding our souls with every weapon made, let alone used, to destroy another child of God half a world away or right next door. How could a nation that spends more money than any other in the world on the military not be infected by a culture of violence? How can we spend billions on bombs and guns and drones and missiles while neglecting the necessary funds for education and housing and healthcare, and yet claim to respect life? How can our leaders instruct us to kill abroad and be surprised when we find no other way to handle our problems here at home? How can we demand respect for human dignity while we continually glorify violence that tears human beings apart? How can we respect life while waging death?
We live in a deadly world, and we keep making it deadlier. So we are afraid, and we cling to our guns, and when someone poisoned by the idolatry of violence fires one of those guns, fearful people cling ever more tightly to their guns. When our own government clings to its nuclear arsenal in the name of "deterrence," how can we expect anything less of citizens?
As long as we live in fear and glorify violence, we can’t be surprised that efforts for gun control go nowhere. Of course we need gun control, but we also need to control our addiction to the myth that peace can be waged through violence. I can’t think of any myth that has so thoroughly duped humanity as the satanic lie that peace can be bought from sacrifice — from murder and war. The notion of a war to end all wars, a permanent peace arising from the rubble of destruction and death, is so demonstrably false. The house divided against itself is our own world, and we cannot stand like this. Will we keep hurtling ourselves headfirst toward our own destruction, putting our faith in instruments of death?
Celebrating Interdependence
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Image via STILLFX/Shutterstock
I did not celebrate Independence Day this past weekend.
The truth is the United States has never been an independent nation. Built on stolen land by stolen labor, sacrificing Natives and Africans and their descendants to the mythology of “manifest destiny,” greed, oppression, and white supremacy, this has never been a nation of liberty and justice for all.
The ignoble myth of white supremacy that permeates the foundation of this country and underlies the policies and institutions that form the context of our lives has been rearing its ugly head so much lately that it cannot be as easily ignored or denied as it has been in the past. The recent massacre in Charleston and the burning of African-American churches add even more reasons to the hundreds of thousands to awaken to the reality of racism that undermines best ideals of this nation. Our country has failed to atone for, or even critically examine, its history of racial oppression.