Jim Wallis 11-21-2019

What does discipleship look like?

I was in Tuscon, Ariz., this week for the final day of the trial of Scott Warren, a volunteer who helps migrants in the desert. He was charged with a felony for “harboring” and assisting “illegal aliens” with a potential sentence of 10 years in prison. I gave a statement outside the Tucson courthouse and then joined a group of clergy flooding the courtroom as the closing arguments were presented and the jury was sent out to make their decision.

Some 120 prisoners are currently on death row and two were executed this year. Fifteen were executed in 2018, the highest number for a decade, including 13 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, who had been convicted of carrying out sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway.
Simran Jeet Singh 11-21-2019

Mark Charles describes himself as a dual citizen of the United States and the Navajo Nation. He is making history this year by becoming the second-ever Native American to run for president of the United States of America. I recently heard Mark speaking at the Aspen Institute about how white supremacy infiltrated Christian theology to justify colonialism, oppression, and genocidal violence. I also read his recent book on this topic co-authored with Soong-Chan Rah titled Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

Liz Lwanga 11-21-2019

Sustainable fashion is a rapidly growing movement. Honoring the labor, expertise, and material resources used to make clothes is also an essential way for people of faith to honor God. So how do we do that effectively? Thankfully, the solution starts no further than your closet. Here are five ways to dive in and begin embodying Christ’s righteousness in your relationship to your clothes.

An Arizona jury on Wednesday found a human rights activist not guilty of harboring two migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, after the U.S. government prosecuted him for giving them food, water, and shelter in the desert.

11-20-2019

In the second season of The Soul of the Nation, Jim Wallis is sitting down with some of the presidential candidates to discuss how their faith informs their work. Following is a transcript of Wallis’ interview with Sen. Cory Booker, discussing Booker’s faith, the role of faith in the public square, his favorite hymn, and more.

Listen to the audio version of this episode here.

Kimberly Winston 11-20-2019

The film also gets right Rogers’ deep belief in God and Junod’s persistent doubt. Junod was raised a Catholic but fell away from the church. For a while he attended a Presbyterian church, but now does not. He is still interested in the spiritual, he says, and a lot of that stems from his relationship with Rogers. This summer, as publicity for the movie was heating up, Junod recovered 70 emails he exchanged with Rogers from an old laptop, many of them about theology.

11-20-2019

In the second season of The Soul of the Nation, Jim Wallis is sitting down with some of the presidential candidates to discuss how their faith informs their work. Following is a transcript of Wallis’ interview with Julián Castro, discussing Castro’s Catholic faith and upbringing, why Democrats should talk more about religion, and more.

Listen to the audio version of this episode here.

Gareth Higgins 11-19-2019

Motherless Brooklyn, writer-director-star Edward Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, is confident enough in its own scope to begin with Shakespeare, and it certainly backs up this confidence with an argument. A quotation from Measure for Measure invites us to reflect on the nature of power: “O! It is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”

The United States, in particular, is abandoning our founding principles and those that have sustained our position as the aspirational bastion of freedom and opportunity. Our failure is reprehensible: Even as we fail to protect children, we are daily compounding their trauma and harm through policies detention and separation. History will remember the cruelty of this administration, the atrophy of moral leadership, and the apathy of the American people.