Our conversations about the many challenges confronting us — poverty, immigration, racism, sexism, environmental destruction — must always begin with an acknowledgement of our shared responsibility to care for God’s people and God’s creation.
This poem by Allison Woodard, which first aired on The Liturgists podcast last year, speaks to the role of God as mother figure in our lives. Many thanks to both Allison and the podcast for permission to share this poem.
Hunger strikes allow detained immigrants to regain their agency while simultaneously throwing themselves on the mercy of the very institution that has oppressed them.
Jesus came to liberate people. That’s what Jesus has done in his ministry. When we read Jesus’ parables and quotes in Luke’s gospel, as well as in Matthew, you can find out that Jesus is a social reformer. So that is in the Palestinian context. When we see Jesus as our God, we should contextualize him in our own context, so then we can see Jesus as our God, or else he’ll be a normal human being — like Martin Luther, Martin Luther King — but he is different from other liberators.
Reading the flood of obituaries and tributes to Jean over the past weeks, I have been struck by this insight: Jean’s central message about transforming structures of privilege to build community across every imaginable kind of difference makes sense without reference to Jesus — but his life doesn’t. His deepest desires and choices were all tied to his reading of the gospel stories of Jesus and his community.
There are moments in Long Shot, the new comedy in which Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen fall for each other, save the country from dehumanizing polarization, and (maybe) the planet from dehumanized humans, in which I wondered if I was watching something as good as Tootsie. It’s really easy to make a slapstick joke, but really hard to integrate dozens of them into a coherent work (there’s a reason the Marx Brothers don’t have many heirs); and it’s even harder to weave comic tropes into a story that also manages to feel like real life.
Black Millennial faith, bodies in deserts, global religious persecution, climate warriors, and more!
“In a representative democracy, if our legislators are not legislating in accordance with the moral law that we’re given by God, then it’s really on us to select representatives who will legislate in accordance with that law,” she said.
Rev. C.J. Hawking, Executive Director of Arise Chicago, has worked at the intersection of faith and organized labor for over 30 years. Arise Chicago helps organize religious communities in support of union campaigns and advocates for workers’ rights and dignity in the workplace. For Rev. Hawking, the co-author of Staley: The Fight for the New American Labor Movement, this activism is an essential part of her faith and the church’s call to be faithful to the gospel. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Rev. Hawking about Arise Chicago’s work, and how churches can support the labor movement in their fight for workplace democracy and a more equitable economic order.