Like Chau, I wanted to be a missionary from the time I was a teenager. I too gorged myself on the stories of Bruce Olsen and David Livingstone. Inspired by their attempts to spread the Gospel around the world, I graduated from high school a year early and enrolled in a two-year missionary school in Florida. Jesus, I believed, would not return until every people group on earth had received the good news of salvation through faith in Jesus. Someone would have to go. If not me, then who? This is one of the exact questions Chau left behind in a letter to his friends and family.
Roaring lions that tear their prey, open their mouths wide against us. They beat us, arrest us, incarcerate us, shoot us, then blame us. We are poured out like water, and all our bones are out of joint. Our hearts have turned to wax; they have melted within us.
The United Religions Initiative, The Charter of Compassion, and The Parliament of the World’s Religions released a joint statement yesterday calling for “an immediate cease-fire in the civil war between the Yemen government and the Houthis rebels.”
The letter states that aid workers from religious and humanitarian organizations have been restricted from administering food, water, shelter, and healthcare to 14 million people enduring a deadly famine.
1. Feds deport undocumented immigrant whose church supporters went to jail to protect him
Samuel Oliver-Bruno took refuge in a church basement for 11 months until he was detained during an appointment with immigration authorities last week.
2. At Capacity: Weaponizing Inefficiency at the Border
“The asylum process is inefficient, and no one has an incentive to fix it.”
When I was in the police academy, each of us recruits were sprayed point-blank in the face with oleoresin capsicum (OC), a cayenne pepper-based spray. This was done for two reasons: first, this experience would help us to know what it feels like when we use it on someone so that we would use it only when truly necessary; second, in case we ever were sprayed unintentionally, we had to still find our radio or a way to safety. Indeed, I’ll never forget the excruciating burning sensation and excessive mucus that put me out of commission for much of the rest of the day.
This bill is very aptly named. The First Step Act is just that and no better — a first, extremely modest step on what will need to be a much longer path of extensive reforms to a deeply broken system. That system can best be understood, as Bryan Stevenson and others have so clearly pointed out, as the direct evolution of slavery into the system of mass incarceration.
While Tijuana and California received most of the remaining asylum seekers in the heavily publicized “caravan,” cities all along the U.S.-Mexico border have seen smaller eruptions in the ongoing immigration disaster. Advocates working in those cities do not, however, say that they are seeing waves of immigrants, floods of asylum seekers, or any other crisis-invoking metaphor. The U.S. is not, they say, being overrun.
"The first thing I did was grab my children," said Meza. A photo of her clutching the hands of twin 5-year-old daughters Saira and Cheili, as her 13-year-old daughter Jamie runs alongside, has gone viral and sparked angry reactions from some lawmakers and charities.
As I’m reading this scripture with my friend on death row, he asks me to repeat the scripture again and takes my Bible to look at it himself. When you are on the row, it is almost a requirement to build up walls all around you so that you ensure that you are not inflicted with even more pain and suffering — death row is enough. He talks about all of the walls that he has built up over the years. He has become a fortified city. He wants to break free. He wants the walls to come tumbling down. But he worries what will happen if he is that vulnerable. So he looks at me and says, “I am glad God writes my name on his palm even though I have all of these walls around me.” “Me too,” I say.
Last week, the world was introduced to John Allen Chau, the U.S. American “adventurer” and missionary who was killed by an indigenous group on North Sentinel Island. According to a statement from missionary organization All Nations, Chau was a “seasoned traveler who was well-versed in cross-cultural issues” and had “previously taken part in missions projects in Iraq, Kurdistan and South Africa.” Now, Indian police have begun the dangerous mission of trying to recover the body even though a tribal rights group has urged officials to call off the search, claiming it puts them and the indigenous group in danger.