Every fall, Sojourners welcomes 8 - 10 leaders to our office here in Washington, D.C. for a year-long internship program focused on spiritual formation, professional development, vocational discernment, and communal living. Program members are placed in different departments and work full-time alongside our staff. Throughout the program, interns practice intentional community living: sharing a budget, meals, spiritual practices, sorrows and joys, among many other things.
This weekend, more than 80 faith communities in Maryland will lift up climate justice as part of the fourth annual “Climate in the Pulpits / on the Bimah / in the Minbar” event. Jointly organized by Interfaith Power & Light (DC.MD.NoVa) and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, the event is a multi-faith effort to carry the message of creation care from the pews to policy makers.
These attacks on people’s innate dignity and sacred worth assault our most cherished moral and religious values. We read in Genesis that all people are made in the image of God. In Paul’s letters, he proclaims that in God earthly divisions fall away, that all people form part of God’s body. Jesus himself promises: Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. Attempts to excuse human rights abuses committed against some people are thus not just unconstitutional — they assault God by denigrating and desecrating that divine, indwelling spark.
"There's no justification for shooting Laquan McDonald that night," prosecutor Jody Gleason said on Thursday. "Not one shot. Not the first shot. Not the sixteenth shot."
Mukwege heads the Panzi Hospital in the eastern Congolese city of Bukavu. Opened in 1999, the clinic receives thousands of women each year, many of them requiring surgery from sexual violence. Murad is an advocate for the Yazidi minority in Iraq and for refugee and women's rights in general. She was enslaved and raped by Islamic State fighters in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014.
1. Can The Good Place Save Us from Our Real Life Bad Place?
Asking for a friend …
2. For the Men Asking ‘What Can We Do?’
To start: listen.
Rain and a palpable heaviness covered the Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford hearings last week. This afternoon, Cancel Kavanaugh: Believe Survivors marchers perspired under a hot sun while they shouted resistance to the Supreme Court nominee.
Climate change is a crisis of moral proportions. Rather than responding to the climate crisis with resignation or cynicism, our congregations can chart a new path forward by responding to this moral crisis in a distinctively religious way. By probing deeply into our religious traditions, we can present truths that are needed in this time of climate catastrophe.
I think Christians have to do organizing, because it helps us to broaden whatever kind of tunnel vision some of our own traditions unwittingly produce in this fundamentalist age. I often tell my congregation that organizing, justice work, is essential for Christian discipleship, because it helps our heart become less wicked. It puts you in relationship and conversation with both systems and individuals that you may need to learn from, or you may need to help transform. I think organizing is critically important in that way.
And nearly every Sunday, as broken bread stands for broken bodies, I am struck with the words of James Baldwin, when he wrote that to be born black or a person of color in America means that you must “give up all hope of communion.”
When Baldwin wrote those words he believed that the nation was both a Christian nation and a white nation. White supremacy was the foundation of American rites and rights. Whiteness was a prerequisite to be encircled by compassion and included in citizenship. The denial of communion — the denial of the body of Christ and the rejection from the body politic — was connected to the nation’s original sin.