My years of healing have taught me that childhood sexual abuse creates terrible trauma that is stored in our bodies, hiding in the nooks and crannies of a life struggling to be “normal” and free of pain. I learned those truths because I was a victim of sexual abuse in what I believed to be a safe place, my faith community.
Ramirez: I think like what you said, it's taking the side of the broken, the beaten, and the defeated. It’s knowing that when you say, “You just gotta lift yourself up by the bootstraps,” that not everybody has boots to be lifted up by. Justice looks like that. It looks like taking the side of the one being accused, the one being pummeled, not even just today, but throughout history because there are whole people groups who have been pummeled. Justice looks like giving people a taste of a true Jesus. Jesus would go to the woman at the well even if all of culture said not to, even if people looked down on him, even if it might have been bad for his reputation, that’s what he did. So often we like to tell good stories and take pictures of refugees and orphans somewhere else, but we very much like to ignore the causes that we should be fighting for here. For me, that's what justice looks like.
As a listener in this space, I choose to sit with them no matter where they are sitting — in the dark or in the light. And maybe, not surprisingly, I have learned more from sitting in the darkness with them. We have all learned by dwelling there. God abides with us as we sit in the darkness. We do not sit alone. The creator of darkness s sits with us. We feel to the marrow of our bones God’s abiding presence. We also know that darkness does not have the final word — light does. . If we will but wait long enough, eventually the sun will come up and the darkness will end.
"Truces maintained by walls and displays of power will not lead to peace, but only the concrete desire to listen and to engage in dialogue will," he said in his second speech of the day, after a private meeting among the religious leaders.
1. Women Faith Leaders Bear Witness at the U.S.-Mexico Border
“Gloria Anzaldúa famously referred to the U.S.-Mexico border as una herida abierta — an open wound. … But if the border is a wound, then perhaps we can best describe our nation as doubting Thomas before his encounter with Christ.”
2. Americans Are Having Fewer Babies. They Told Us Why.
From The New York Times. Spoiler alert: Babies are expensive.
The overall composite image of God’s face that resulted from the selections has a few obvious features. The face is masculine, white, and young. These features stand out best in comparison with what the researchers call God’s “anti-face,” a composite of all of the images in each pair participants did not choose. This anti-face was more feminine, older, and darker skinned.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has resigned, Trump said on Thursday.
The decision to uphold President Donald Trump’s callous Muslim ban will be remembered in history alongside other cases where the highest court in the land failed deeply and shamefully to deliver justice, like Dred Scott when SCOTUS denied citizenship to anyone of African descent and Korematsu when SCOTUS upheld internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
U.S. Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego last month ordered the government to stop separating children from immigrant parents entering the United States illegally and set deadlines for the government to reunite families.