Practicing silence can be counter-intuitive among progressive Jesus-followers who want to usurp the Trump-supporting, fear-mongering, Fox News version of Christianity. We’re emboldened to speak up and out, responding to next oppressive policy, the next breaking story, the next call to use our privilege to work on behalf of those who have little or none. But we risk something in this cycle: the development of a savior complex that loses touch with God’s direction of our call because we are too busy working to hear it.
La Casa del Peregrino in Mexico City serves as a place of refugee for those traveling across Mexico to the U.S. border in hopes of obtaining asylum.
Migrant people hold the now and the not yet in tension. In the midst of waiting to make it up north and taking their turn for a credible fear interview at the border, life continues. People find ways to feel alive, to keep hope alive. At La Casa del Peregrino, holding on to hope looked like doing karaoke, coloring banners, and making beaded bracelets. They were not devoid of life.
I believe the remembrance of the life of George H. W. Bush last week and going forward give this man one final mission: to demonstrate the values that reveal who genuine leaders are, contrasting the values (or lack thereof) that reveal who are not. What does a leader do or not do? What are the markers of true public service that differentiate it from public exploitation?
Dr. Denis Mukwege, who has just received the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, shows us one example of what global Pentecostalism can look like. Mukwege is sharing the award with Nadia Murad of Iraq for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.
Mukwege’s Panzi Hospital, located in Bukavu at the heart of the conflict-ridden South Kivu province, treated over 50,000 survivors of sexual violence during the last 20 years. Mukwege has also repeatedly criticized the Congolese government. In 2012, he was almost assassinated and his family was held at gunpoint.
In late September, about 20 men and women sat on folding chairs on the back patio of a large, colonial house in Ohio. The youngest in the group were in their mid-20s; the oldest were in their 70s and 80s. They’d traveled from New York, Nevada, Montana, California, as far as away as Calgary, Canada, to this small city 38 miles northeast of Cincinnati. Many of them wore bright yellow T-shirts with bold red letters that read “JESUS SAVES” or “TRUST JESUS,” and they sat facing a makeshift pulpit, decorated with signs reading “HEAVEN OR HELL?” and “PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD."
More than 1,000 young adults risked arrest Monday in Washington, D.C. by flooding the offices of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). It’s the second time this winter that the Sunrise Movement has taken to the capitol in what Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash referred to as part of a concentrated effort, “[to] build policy support and people power” around a Green New Deal.
Souls to the Polls is a time-honored tradition, often led by clergy, to activate and engage congregants to exercise their right to vote that starts long before Election Day. It is a mobilization strategy to make the process of voting easier for their congregants. But sadly, voter suppression efforts targeting minorities in subtle and overt ways continue to make Souls to the Polls a critical service — placing the burden of voter education and empowerment on the backs of churches and other civil society organizations, not the government.
The group, called Shut Tornillo Down Coalition, says that the center adds to the abuse of vulnerable children by imprisoning them and separating them from their families and causes them deep harm by compounding on already existent trauma.
1. VIDEO: The Church That Meets in a Parking Lot
Every year thousands of churches shutter their doors and die. But here's one congregation that found that shutting their doors — and destroying their building — gave them a new way to survive. Watch and learn more about Los Angeles First United Methodist Church.
2. He Built an Empire, With Detained Migrant Children as the Bricks
The New York Times does a deep dive on the founder of Southwest Key Programs, which has collected $1.7 billion in government contracts and houses more children who have crossed the border than any other detention group in the nation.