After the Armed Forces of the Philippines shot and killed 19 people in Toboso, Negros Occidental, Philippines, Christian clergy have been active in efforts to seek truth and justice for the slain, including one they knew intimately as a colleague in social justice.
Lyle Prijoles was a Filipino American activist who worked alongside many Christian clergy in the U.S. Bay Area. Prijoles was in the Philippines working with sugarcane workers when he was one of the 19 killed—the Armed Forces have claimed that all those slain on April 19 were members of the New People’s Army, a revolutionary, armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. But that account has been disputed. The Communist Party of the Philippines has claimed only 10 were part of the NPA. Grassroots organizations and independent fact-finding missions have found the same; Prijoles was one of at least nine people reported to be civilians. In the months following those deaths, many of those who once organized with Prijoles have joined in the resounding call for justice.
In the months since, 11 members of Congress have called on the Philippine government to conduct an independent, impartial investigation into the killings. One of the groups that sought to perform such an investigation included several Christian clergy from the Philippines and the U.S.
In the fall of 2013, my family drove from the city of Boston to Greenville, S.C. We visited Charleston, S.C., where Confederate flags could still be seen at government buildings and all over Fort Sumter. As I walked through the city in the humid southern heat, I thought about the negative aspects of white culture in the South—racism, misogyny, and homophobia. I continued thinking about those things as we pulled into the school my parents chose for me: Bob Jones University. A little less than a mile away, at a Jack in the Box, I had stepped into the restroom to trade my shorts and tank top for a tan maxi dress and sweater, well aware my knees and shoulders would not be a tolerated sight at the ultra-fundamentalist university. Besides knowing about the dress code, I went in unprepared for the dynamic cultural shift I was about to experience.
One day, after washing the feet and hands of men and women with leprosy, Angela of Foligno, the 13th-century saint and mystic, ate a leperous sore. “We drank the very water with which we had washed him,” she writes. “And the drink was so sweet that, all the way home, we tasted its sweetness and it was as if we had received Holy Communion. As a small scale of the leper’s sores was stuck in my throat, I tried to swallow it. My conscience would not let me spit it out, just as if I had received Holy Communion.”
On the one hand, it’s a radical testament: that all bodies are holy, and those most marginalized and considered “unclean” are Christ’s truest flesh. But on the other hand—what was the man with leprosy thinking in that moment as he watched Angela do this? What was his story, his life, his human experience that Angela saw as a gateway to God?
The White Sox beating the Cincinnati Reds this week in Chicago? There isn’t a bigger sure thing in sports, right?
Come on. Is the pope Catholic?
More to the point, is the pope a White Sox fan from Chicago?
As if that kind of divine firepower doesn’t already suggest some kind of winged assist from above for the White Sox’s sudden ascent into playoff contention this year after averaging 108 losses the past three, the White Sox promotions department rubbed it in with the Reds’ arrival to town for a series.
They brought out a nun for the ceremonial first pitch of the series and gave away “pope hats” to fans who shrugged off inclement weather forecasts to produce only the ninth sellout of the season at the Sox ballpark with 38,000 Pope Leo impersonators wearing their new hats for the beer-boosted, fun-loving – if perhaps a tad sacrilegious – promotion.
There's an early moment in the new Little House on the Prairie series that I keep thinking about.
Progressive religious leaders in Idaho are pushing back against a new state law that would force transgender people to use bathrooms aligned with their sex assigned at birth, a measure that is partially on hold following a preliminary injunction issued in June.
House Bill 752, which was scheduled to go into full effect on July 1, would require people to use bathrooms, locker rooms and other sex-segregated facilities matching their sex at birth, with criminal penalties for those who don’t comply. Six transgender Idahoans challenged the law in federal court, and a federal judge issued a temporary order predicting it would not survive legal scrutiny. The injunction also ruled that transgender people can use restrooms of their choosing if a single stall restroom is not readily available.
The state’s attorney general said he plans to appeal.
Although the law is backed by conservative Christians and was drafted by a legislature that opens most meetings with a Christian prayer, many progressive religious leaders have said it is unrepresentative of their faith and are speaking out against it. Some are also wrestling with separate questions: Does the bill apply to religious institutions, and should it?
Several Catholic nursing homes in New York, including two in Westchester County, won’t have to comply with the state's newly-enacted Medical Aid in Dying Act while their lawsuit against it is underway.
Walking into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Delaney Hall detention facility in New Jersey, Rev. Robin Tanner quickly noticed that the windows were blocked off. Tanner, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Summit, N.J., pointed out one issue for people inside: “For many people in their faith tradition, [prayer] is a daily act,” she said. Muslims are instructed to face the city of Mecca during their five daily prayers, and a Muslim detainee wouldn’t have any way to know which direction to pray.
But for months, Amadou, a father and truck driver from Burkina Faso, whose full name Sojourners is withholding for his safety, struggled to convince guards to let him pray with other detainees at all. In Islam, Friday prayers, or salat al-Jumu’ah, are not only obligatory for every nondisabled man but are required to be performed in congregation. Amadou was detained 16 months ago and transferred to New Jersey last year. In Delaney Hall, it took four months for Amadou and other Muslim detainees to gain access to occasional gatherings for Friday prayer, finally prevailing in time for Ramadan.
ICE has a stated duty to provide spiritual care for those in its custody. According to ICE manuals, detainees must be provided with “regular opportunities to participate in practices of their religious faiths, limited only by a documented threat to the safety of persons involved in such activity itself or disruption of order in the facility.” As ICE continues to fail even its own guidance, a host of faith leaders have emerged to chip away at the agency’s spiritual blockade of those in its custody.
Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche is one step closer to confirmation after the Republican Judiciary Committee voted to advance his appointment on a party-line vote on Tuesday, and based on promises he made to faith leaders around the country last week, that means national anti-abortion actions may be one step closer as well.
In a conference call hosted by the White House Faith Office on July 30 with thousands of religious leaders around the country, Blanche said he was committed to achieving policy solutions so that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision “becomes permanent in every single state.”
A recording of the call was publicly available on YouTube as of Tuesday, posted by Intercessors of America, a religious group in Virginia, but was removed by late Tuesday afternoon.
Midway through Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) needs to track down the escaped villain Scorpion, so he tells his NYPD contact, Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), that he’s going to hack every security camera in New York City to find his face.