Most years are a give and take, but 2020 lost its balance. It mainly took lives and gave news. Every justice story had a faith angle and every faith story had a justice angle. When the editors of Sojourners look back on this historical year, these four faith and justice stories will loom the largest.
The evening sky over the Northern Hemisphere treated stargazers to a once-in-a-lifetime illusion on Monday as the solar system's two biggest planets appeared to meet in a celestial alignment that astronomers call the "Great Conjunction."
A statue of Black civil rights activist Barbara Johns, who played a key role in the desegregation of the public school system, will be installed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, officials said on Monday, replacing one of a leader of the pro-slavery Confederacy.
My mother's favorite expression was "the longest day has an end."
I think she often said this silently to herself after another day of
factory work, after another day of working in the garment
industry, after another day of taking care of three children,
after a day of cold water and another night of no heat. Even
when there were the Clifton "good times" she reminded us that
this too would end.
We long for Silent Night in crowded pews, by candlelight.
May we who stay at home now find your Christmas blessing.
Reading was the safest way to travel this year — sometimes to another decade and another brand of violence, sometimes to a different continent or a different galaxy altogether. Below are Sojourners' editors' favorite books of the year. Most of these books came out years ago, but by reading them through the lens of 2020, we found new wisdom, escape, resonance, and hope.
To be a Black woman in America and be relatively conscious, to paraphrase James Baldwin, is to be in a state of constant rage. Sweet holy songs don’t readily come to me. Christmas songs do not come to me. As a Black woman who happens to serve at a church that experienced white rage this past weekend when a group of demonstrators ripped down our Black Lives Matter banner and set it on fire, I am angry. And I’m tired.
Web traffic slumps in mid-December, that’s just the way the internet works. And we — the people who make the internet, or at least, Sojourners’ humble corner of it — never much mind because we assume it means you are busy doing wholesome things like baking cookies, building snowfolk, or calling your elected officials to voice your support for the newest bipartisan COVID-19 relief bill.
While Godmothered and its fairy are far from cinematic perfection, by the time the credits roll, Eleanor and Mackenzie have helped each other step more fully into who they both truly were meant to be. In this way, their relationship — minus the wand, the fairy dust, and any promise of true-love-happily-ever-afterness — more realistically resembles actual godparenting.
President-elect Joe Biden will nominate Rep. Deb Haaland to serve as his interior secretary, according to a person familiar with the matter. Haaland, a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico since 2019, would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary and the first to oversee the department, whose jurisdiction includes tribal lands.