“My name is Maria Herrera,” she told the congregation, “and I have four disappeared sons.” She went on to plead for their solidarity: for anyone with information about where the brigade might find clandestine graves to speak out. The brigade, Maria emphasized, doesn’t look for guilty parties. They don’t care about finding out who took their loved ones. They just look for their family members, dead or alive.
To my acquaintance, and white people who need to hear it, I say this lovingly and from a place of abundance, without scarcity: I know you are hurting too. You are human. But this is not about your pain.
When the spirit came down and lit a fire in the remnant of Jesus followers on Pentecost, those followers immediately went out to the streets and protested.
Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, speaks with Rev. Jim Wallis about our need to focus our outrage on the tragic death of George Floyd and the systemic structures that caused it. She warns against being distracted by Donald Trump's brazen attempt to falsely cloak himself with spiritual authority by staging a photo op in front of St. John's, Lafayette Square.
Eddie Glaude has rightly named the violent White House walk to St. John’s as “dictatorial theatre.” The words that came to mind for many of us were sacrilege and blasphemy. Here's the dictionary's definition of blasphemy: "Impious utterance or action concerning God or sacred things." Another word that came to mind was authoritarian. At the epicenter of political power in the United States stands a little church that Donald Trump has decided to violently use — and now St. John’s stands inside a police perimeter surrounding that seat of power.
The Shift is Colby Martin's attempt to provide a survival guide for those who’ve left (or been kicked out of) their conservative Christian communities and are now moving toward a more open and expansive faith.
In Exodus, the Egyptians shed innocent blood. Then God made this blood visible for all to see.
At the end of May, the Amazon basin region had almost 134,000 confirmed cases and 6,883 reported COVID-19 deaths according to a Catholic Church aggregation of published official government data from the region. There were nearly 115,000 cases in the Brazilian Amazon basin alone.