Vanessa Martinez Soltero is an activist bridging her Christian faith and Indigenous traditions to sustain herself and community.
To our fellowship year, the 38th cycle of Sojourners fellows bring our passion for justice, love for storytelling, commitment to radical welcome, and the desire to put our faith in action as members of the body of Christ. We are bringing ourselves and our experiences to the work of Sojourners while allowing the community and work of Sojourners to shape us.
The latest headlines are filled with news of worker shortages, delayed supply chains, and labor strikes. Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations strike tracker reports more than 181 strikes so far this year, with 38 of them taking place in the first two weeks of October, spurring the AFL-CIO to name this month “Striketober.” These strikes span all kinds of industries, from hospital workers to whisky makers.
Should Christians have anything to do with horror? Is there anything commendable or worthy of praise in the genre?
As a pastor whose love of horror has only deepened over the years, I offer a resounding yes. Horror is a genre uniquely able to invite us into spaces of confession and lament, if only we have ears to hear.
In Lauren Groff’s newest novel, Matrix, monastic life in the High Middle Ages serves as a stunning backdrop for the story of Marie, a nun who feels “her greatness hot in her blood.” Marie arrives at an English abbey as a reluctant teenager, at the appointment of her queen, Eleanor, who expects Marie to become abbess and save the Crown from the public shame of a royal abbey where nuns die of starvation and disease.
Cypriot artist George Gavriel almost lost his job as a high school headmaster after his works depicting Jesus in unconventional settings and also taking a swipe at politicians drew the wrath of religious and government leaders.
Gavriel, 62, uses his art as a protest medium to take aim at what he considers the ills of society.
When Angela Jordan started homeschooling 21 years ago, she was Abeka all the way.
It didn’t take long, though, for Jordan to realize that Abeka — the conservative Christian curriculum popular in homeschooling and in private Christian schools — presented a take on history intent on downplaying racism, white supremacy, and sometimes just plain facts.
The most incredible part of landing on the moon is not the making it there, but the safely making it back. NASA’s missions to the moon and back were feats of engineering, math, and creativity. The stories are oft retold from a variety of angles and perspectives, and I will never tire of it.
Some people may not know that when we went to the moon, we left a lot of junk there. Lighter space crafts can escape gravity easier, so anything that didn’t need to come home didn’t. Included on the list of things that didn’t need to come back from Apollo 11 through Apollo 17: Twelve Hasselblad camera bodies and lenses. (Another fun fact: Until recently, one of the cameras that was supposed to return had been missing for nearly 50 years.)
The FDA’s full approval in late August of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, known commercially as Comirnaty, has led to a spate of government and corporate vaccine mandates for employees and patrons — as well as the inevitable backlash. Much of that backlash has been on religious grounds, with some Christians claiming exemption from the mandates using what journalist Mattathias Schwartz describes as the “rhetorical Swiss Army knife” of religious freedom.
One of the best things I ever found at Goodwill was a complete set of all Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories — a major coup for middle-school, mystery-loving me. Unfortunately, the books smelled as if they had spent a few decades in the smoke-infused den of Holmes’ Baker Street lodgings. I sandwiched dryer sheets between the pages and read them all cover-to-cover.