Since the pandemic upended life as we knew it over two years ago, I have found the apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth particularly instructive. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul provides one of the most poignant metaphors in all of scripture, comparing the health of the church to that of the human body — a comparison that also applies to the health of our broader communities, nation, and world.
But while my ethical objections led me to atheism, my trauma led me back to Christ. Simply put: I had a relapse and sought out a faith community because I needed to be around people. Praying helped. Being around people helped. Devoting myself to something bigger than myself and to Christ on the cross was an incredible comfort while I searched for effective medical treatment.
In New York City’s Upper East Side, just down the road from the Met Gala’s red-carpet celebrities and flashbulbs, around 400 high school students, teachers, alumni, parents, and formerly incarcerated people came to Regis High School’s auditorium on Monday night to listen to two high school debate students compete against two alumni of the Rikers Debate Project.
The show is based on Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book of the same title, detailing the brutal 1984 murder of a woman and her infant baby by two brothers from the Lafferty clan, a prominent family in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
During my time in college and graduate school, I accumulated something like $50,000 in debt. So, you’d imagine I would be particularly excited about the prospect of Biden forgiving some of my debt. But I already paid off my student loans! Does that mean I rue others getting theirs forgiven? No! I am happy that other people may receive debt forgiveness even if it doesn’t apply to me.
On the evening of May 2, Politico reported on a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson which, if it became official, would overturn Roe v. Wade and end federal protections of abortion rights.
“[Sanctions] are, as we see now in the case of Russia, warfare by other means,” Jim Hodgson, a retired program coordinator for the United Church of Canada whose decades of work focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, told Sojourners.
Through the years, we’ve written about the ways churches can help workers — and the way workers can help the church.
The devastation of the 1992 riots inspired Hyepin Im to advocate for the economic and political empowerment of underserved communities, including Korean Americans — and her own faith led her to look for ways that churches could be more effective partners in this work.
If God tends to the lilies of the field, how much more will God protect the poor and oppressed (Matthew 6:25-34)? This is the correct definition of divine providence: God cares for, loves, and empathizes with the meek who will one day inherit the earth. This is the providence that theologian James H. Cone imagined in his seminal work God of the Oppressed: “God has not ever, no not ever, left the oppressed alone in struggle. He was with them in Pharaoh’s Egypt, is with them in America, Africa, and Latin America, and will come in the end of time to consummate fully their human freedom.”