This Month's Cover
Magazine

Sojourners Magazine: January 2009

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You've read the experts' memos to Obama. Now see our readers' photo memos.

10 simple steps to desegregating your Web site.

A conversation with Emmanuel M. Katongole, co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School.

Jacob Bathanti, reads his poem and shares how a friend's return from war made him long for peace.

Writer Valerie Weaver-Zercher on how to raise kids without "branding" them.

Looking for Christmas gifts for kids? Here is a list of great kids books.

With his sock puppet friend, Ed Spivey Jr. takes on the economic crisis, former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, and ... muffins.

About a week before my first day on the job at Sojourners, a very exciting piece of news made its way around the office: Barack Obama had worked out at the gym across the street from Sojourners.

Cover Story

Memos to the new president from political, cultural, and religious leaders.

Feature

For years, I had fought against the stigmas that dehumanize people with mental illness. Now here I was on the inside.
A Ugandan Catholic priest, the child of Rwandan parents -- one Hutu and the other Tutsi -- explains how missionary Christianity helped create the divisions that led to genocide.

Commentary

Overcoming online segregation.
The U.S.-India nuclear deal fans the flames of the global arms race.

Columns

The faith community can help bring people together on the biggest moral issues of our time, even across old political divisions.
Made you look. Anyway, the world economy continues to spin downward despite my previous column on the subject, which was intended to bring needed comic relief to struggling world markets.

Culture Watch

Can Obama move us past the culture wars of the last 40 years?
Helping parents resist the siren song of marketers.
As mainline churches work to find positions on difficult social issues, Westminster John Knox Press recovers a 20th-century pro­phetic voice.

Departments

In September, hundreds of churches nationwide joined in Poverty Sunday, part of Sojourners’ Vote Out Poverty campaign, to preach justice for the poor from the pulpit.
In Brookville, Pennsylvania, a dispute over laws has shaken the otherwise quiet community.
Actor Paul Newman, who died in September, founded the only global forum of business CEOs focused on increasing corporate philanthropy.
Reflections on the Revised Common Lectionary for January.
Sojourners’ recent interview with novelist Mary Doria Russell (“A Hardheaded Faith,” by Rose Marie Berger, November 2008) leaves me feeling deflated.
A 2008 study commissioned by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good found that social policies that increase economic support to women in the U.S.
“Life-Changing Experience” (by Aaron Graham) in the September- Oc­t­­ober 2008 issue of Sojourners highlights an important part of the journey that we strive to challenge ou
Who am I to cast light upon the human soul? Sitting down to write peace-verses for mercenary gain, Hunting for poems and hoping against hope that I need not
I was struck by the letter from Richard Tillinger regarding his love of machine guns (“Misfire?” September-October 2008).
Regarding “Supreme Illogic: Catholic social teaching and gun control,” by Joe Nangle, OFM (November 2008): Pope John Paul II’s 1994 document by the Holy See’s Pontifical Cou
What with the destruction of the ozone layer, God’s people need some serious eye protection.

Web Extra

Listen in to our conversation with Emmanuel M. Katongole, a Catholic priest of the Kampala archdiocese in Uganda and co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School.
Written to Read at a Peace Rally
Ending online segregation is about using online tools to leverage your social network of friends and contacts in order to advocate for social justice.
Listen in as Valerie Weaver-Zercher shares how she avoids "branding" her children while raising them in a label-obsessed world.
Children's literature provides one of the most uplifting, energizing, and soul-freeing pursuits for any child -- or any adult who cares about children.
Sojourners' Art Director and resident humor columnist Ed Spivey Jr. takes on the economic crisis, former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, and muffins in this month's H'rumphs.
Jacob Bathanti talks about yearning for peace after seeing his friend struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from Iraq.
In this excerpt from the book As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda (Zondervan), we learn of the power of reconciliation as demonstrated in the lives of many Rwandans wh