“Let us put a halt to the frantic running around dictated by our agendas. Let us learn how to take a break, to turn off the mobile phone,” Pope Francis said in his weekly address from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square.
I think we usually ask these questions in a penitential key: “Where was God during this tragedy?” Being a human is difficult — so difficult that it is not only hard to imagine someone created us, but also that there exists anything outside of the mess we’ve created. We often collapse in on each other — whether by accident or on purpose.
Modernity claims humans are the only citizens — the owners and rulers of nature – thus fracturing our relationship with nature and with one another as we compete to amass or inherit resources. This voracious system is built to protect those with wealth and their resources rather than to protect human and natural life. The deadly consequences of this paradigm are evident: Last month, the United States experienced the hottest June on record since we began keeping track 127 years ago.
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.