On Dec. 14, siblings Bekah, Caleb, and Joshua Liechty, collectively known as Girl Named Tom, became the first group to win NBC’s The Voice after 20 seasons of solo winners. In a blind audition, the siblings delighted the four celebrity coaches with their tight harmonies, but each of the three got a chance to shine throughout their performances. With the enthusiastic support of their coach, Kelly Clarkson, the trio presented new arrangements of beloved classic rock, country, and folk hits.
The Liechty siblings grew up attending Zion Mennonite Church in Archbold, Ohio, and brothers Caleb and Joshua are graduates of Goshen College, a Mennonite college. While Bekah and Joshua, who spoke with Sojourners, consider their faith identity to be “in exploration,” they continue to be rooted in Mennonite community.
Novelist Edwidge Danticat expressed a similar sentiment in Create Dangerously, her 2010 memoir about making art in exile. Reflecting on the aftermath of the earthquake that had struck her home country of Haiti that year, she wrote, “I did what I always do when my own words fail me. I read.” We share this human practice of story sharing and story seeking. Danticat writes of her “desire to tell some of [her] stories in a collaged manner, to merge [her] own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others.” Through the transformative power of creating and remembering, we connect to the threads of humanity, discovering the woven patterns that are formed through our stories.
After months of negotiations, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) decided to kill the Build Back Better agenda. He made the announcement on Fox News Sunday, just days before an already-fraught holiday as we’re seeing COVID surges, essential workers still being paid wages of those considered expendable, and storms and extreme weather wreaking havoc on lives and livelihoods. When voicing his dissent for the Build Back Better agenda, despite making promises that he was negotiating in good faith since the summer, Manchin had the nerve to say: “I tried everything humanly possible.”
In Matthew’s gospel, King Herod fears a threat to his authority after the birth of Jesus, who the Magi call “king of the Jews.” So he acted as Pharoah had done thousands of years earlier, and ordered the slaughter of male children. On the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28), many churches read and reflect on the horror of slaughtered infants. I read it in September while preparing a church service acknowledging the legacy of Canadian residential schools.
During this Advent season, Sojourners has featured a heavy dose of Mary-oriented stories. As a Protestant, I was taught, similar to Amar Peterman, that we should “be wary of those who spoke of Mary ‘too much.’” But what’s so scary about Mary? Some evangelical Protestants say the reason we should be leery of revering Mary is because if we honor her too much, our faith becomes a cult.
When I met bell hooks three years ago, I had all four of my children in tow and I wasn’t sure what to say. A mutual friend arranged a short visit to her home. My heart was bursting with gratitude for all the ways hooks wove race, gender, class, faith, place, and love into her work. My mind was racing with ways to express some fraction of my appreciation and awe.
Former employees at Preemptive Love Coalition, an international relief organization, have alleged that its leaders created an abusive environment. On Dec. 15, Ben Irwin, the organization’s former director of communications and public relations, wrote on Twitter and in subsequent posts to Medium, that Preemptive Love’s founders, Jeremy and Jessica Courtney, “abused, gaslit, threatened, and mistreated dozens of staff over the years.”
With continual uncertainty and insecurity, maintaining health care services in Haiti has become as much as a challenge as it is needed. “I don’t know what our patients would do if MSF couldn’t provide them with free health care anymore,” Joachim says. "The situation in Haiti is catastrophic. I only hope it could change."
As Christians, we believe it is not just immigrants or asylum seekers who are being bandied about as political pawns; it is Jesus himself. Jesus is being denied adequate legal advice; he has been denied the rights to asylum that are guaranteed under international law. Jesus himself is at risk of being kidnapped and exploited due to the Biden administration’s policies. This Advent, as Christians the world over contemplate the birth of Jesus, they cannot ignore where he is incarnate now, nor the policy decisions that make him absent in our communities.