Maybe you’ve seen the now-viral clip: As air raid sirens wailed, a camera panned the skyline of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. The previous evening, Russia launched a full invasion of the independent democracy, prompting tens of thousands of Ukrainians to flee their homes. In the distance, the gold onion domes of a church glowed, architectural symbolism for divine light, intended to point worshippers to the world beyond. Then CNN’s coverage abruptly cut to an Applebee’s commercial.
As the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing wound to a close in a ceremony of flags, fireworks, and an LED screen designed to look like ice, one Seattle-area church marked the end of the international games with a very different kind of event: a meal and listening session with members of the Uyghur community in and around Edmonds, Wa.
In this opinion short, Sojourners explores the spiritual implications of the missing education and miseducation about Black Americans in the U.S. education system and our biblical mandate to be truth-tellers.
The State of the Union, the annual televised presidential report to Congress, can easily devolve into political theater. But at its best, the address provides the president a critical opportunity to galvanize the nation to overcome shared challenges. When President Joe Biden delivers his first official State of the Union on Tuesday, in addition to addressing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I hope he seizes the moment by tapping into the values that animate his Catholic faith — including the values of solidarity and a “preferential option for the poor.” Solidarity, as understood through Catholic social teaching, is based on the understanding that we are one human family — our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We see this preferential option for the poor in Jesus’ dual call to care for the most vulnerable (Matthew 25) and combat injustice by being “good news to the poor” (Luke 4).
When Christians label books about queer people as perverse and fight to have them removed from public spaces, we are telling queer kids that they are undeserving of both love and dignity. When racist moments in history are sanitized for the benefit of white students, it shows that the Christian commitment to truth and justice extends no further than our own comfort. And when the church helps silence marginalized voices for the sake of politics, we show that our true allegiance is not to God, but to party lines. Banning books will not protect students. It will only cause them harm and hinder our ability to share the gospel.
“Obviously this order is actually going to cause more harm,” said Rev. Gavin Rogers, associate minister at Travis Park Church in San Antonio. Rogers said characterization gender-affirming care as “child abuse” flies in the face of research, which has shown its importance in the health and wellbeing of transgender youth, who already face many barriers to access.
The Vatican, in its first comment on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began on Thursday, said it hoped that those who hold the destiny of the world in their hands would have a “glimmer of conscience.”
Lincoln’s Dilemma, released this month on Apple TV+, presents a complicated version of the 16th president. The four-part series portrays Lincoln as a man of his time and place, wrestling with the culture war of his day: slavery.
We pray for peace, O God of love and justice,
as once again, we face a time of war.
The meek and humble try—amid the crisis—
to love and build, to nurture and restore.
May leaders hear the truth the prophets teach us—
that gifts of peace are well worth struggling for
In effect, imagining churches as places uniquely positioned for practicing reparations means a paradigm shift in how churches imagine themselves in their communities. Churches are capable of celebrating beauty but they are also capable of creating wounds. Such a shift would be akin to what theologian Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas refers to as “broaden[ing] our moral imagination.” For the church to broaden its moral imagination, congregations need to start asking questions like: What does it mean to own property? Who did that exclude in the context of redlining? What assumptions are we making about the assumed good of a church’s continued existence in a place? Being open to accountability and discernment about reparations means that no question, no matter how difficult or threatening to the continuance of a congregation, is off-limits.