As we continue to seek the truth behind the assassination, the real fear among Haitians is over what might happen next. Especially because we have seen how Western powers repeatedly use periods of Haiti’s “destabilization” as a pretext for exploiting the nation’s resources and people.
If we want to understand this tragedy, we must see more clearly the failure of these physical and social structures that we have built and continue to build. For too long, the Christian imagination has divorced our identities and social worlds from geography, as if we exist in the abstract, apart from the land and the built environment we inhabit. But what if who we are — and especially who we are together — is completely dependent on the everyday spaces we inhabit, like high-rise condos and retirement communities?
For those who are just beginning to think critically about racial identity, the creation of whiteness, and how race interacts with our faith and theology, this list offers some helpful places to start.
Those of us who consistently deal with inequities are expected to suffer or die for the sake of making the world a more just place. This causes God’s heart to ache and humanity’s blood to scream out from every corner of the earth. When pain and suffering become the primary means to achieving human rights, many begin to believe Black people suffering and dying for these rights is either God-ordained or a natural part of history. This is a lie. It is what James Baldwin might call a “palatable” lie, as it is “more palatable than the truth” — the truth that would have us fight back against injustice.
Lately I’ve spent a lot of time appreciating unfancy things: Stretchy pants. Popcorn. Picnics. Walks. Very Important Work Calls instantly derailed by a pet cameo.
Her thoughts on guns didn’t immediately change; slowly — as the PTSD and long-term effects of her injuries continued — Schumann began to question the narratives around guns she had grown up with her entire life. Now she’s asking others to join her in questioning the stories we’ve been told about gun violence in the United States.
Azubuike Muodum, a Nigerian migrant living in Johannesburg, South Africa has not had his worst COVID-19 fears realized.
“When the [pandemic] started, I thought it was a disease that is going to kill everyone, more like an end-time plague,” Muodum told Sojourners in May.
Still, the last two years have had challenges. Muodum runs a small-scale restaurant in the central business district of Johannesburg, South Africa; he says the pandemic and subsequent lockdown created a “huge burden” for him and his restaurant. While countries like the United States begin returning to post-pandemic life, Muodum and others who emigrated to South Africa are facing the challenges of a still-spreading COVID-19.
As many people in the United States prepared for the holiday weekend, the Supreme Court’s conservative 6-3 majority upheld two laws that restrict voting in Arizona. The first law the court upheld disenfranchises voters if they cast a ballot in the wrong precinct, invalidating not just their votes for local races, but also their entire ballot, including votes cast in U.S. presidential elections or Senate races, even though all eligible voters in Arizona can vote in those races regardless of the district where they live. The other law prohibits most people from delivering another voter’s absentee ballot to a polling place, making it a crime for anyone but a family member or caregiver to do so.
A federal judge found the U.S. government 60 percent responsible for a 2017 mass shooting that killed 26 people at a rural Texas church, where a former Air Force serviceman used firearms he should not have been allowed to purchase.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez ruled on Tuesday that the Air Force did not use reasonable care when it failed to record Devin Patrick Kelley's plea to domestic violence charges in a database used for background checks on firearms purchases.
He said the government bears "significant responsibility" for harm to victims of the Nov. 5, 2017 massacre at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX.
“I saw my poem posted on another website and attributed to someone else,” Beth Strano wrote in response to a comment on her post. “I thought it was an honest mistake, but then I searched and realized this woman has been claiming that she wrote this poem and publishing it and doing readings of it.”