In the aftermath of a week of horrific killings, America is still reeling. This has given rise to my wonder about how America’s ideological, theological, and political upheaval may appear to the world. Here are 10 views that no doubt the world has witnessed. I hope they also inspire us to action.
Thirty-three people filed into a White House conference room on July 13 for a meeting with President Obama on race and policing, and at times, it got tense,The Washington Post reports.
Based on the seating arrangements, that’s probably not a surprise — activists sat between police chiefs and mayors, the head of the Fraternal Order of Police sat between the NAACP president and a Harvard professor. But eventually, it paid off.
The real power of these assessments is that they become safe spaces for people to tell their own story and in their own terms. Change lies in our collective capacity to open more avenues for first person accounts — and, more importantly, to translate these accounts into first person movements.
CIA Director John Brennan said that if the next president ordered the CIA to resume waterboarding, he would resign, reports The Week.
Waterboarding was banned by President Obama in a 2009 executive order, but the order could theoretically be reversed.
In the wake of a string of racially tinged shootings, majority white churches — even those quiet in past years about racial prejudice — have begun to find their voices.
The latest incidents of police shooting black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, combined with the targeting of white police officers in Dallas, have exposed for many congregations a racial divide in America too wide to ignore.
Canada’s Anglican Church has provisionally voted to amend its rules to allow clergy to celebrate same-sex marriages, a day after it narrowly defeated the measure.
The General Synod will hold a second reading on the measure in 2019. If it passes, the Canadian church will join the Episcopal Church, which formally approved marriage ceremonies regardless of gender in 2015. As a consequence, the Anglican Communion placed temporary restrictions on the Episcopal Church.
El Camino del Inmigrante (the way of the immigrant) is the name of an upcoming 150-mile walk from the California-Mexico border to Los Angeles, arriving in time for the annual Christian Community Development Association conference. Participants in the conference and Southern California residents — immigrants and citizens — will walk together for ten days to remember and to lift up the suffering of migrants as well as their contributions to our country.
Importantly, in the Old Testament, Israel was told to rehearse its story of redemption in its feasts. That story was to spur them on to faithfulness, but also to motivate them to be open to outsiders. They were not to repeat the actions of their oppressors in their engagement with outsiders, but be accepting and helping (e.g., Exodus 22:21; Deuteronomy 5:12-15; 24:17-22).
David Cameron stepped down from his role as prime minister of the United Kingdom on July 13, as he had announced after the Brexit vote.
In his resignation speech in front of 10 Downing Street, the traditional residence of the prime minster, Cameron called his tenure “the greatest honor” of his life. He will continue to serve in parliament as a representative of Witney.
I remember talking to my mom on my walk into work not long after the death of Freddie Gray. She had been watching the news and was wondering what my sense of things was on the ground.
“Are there protests?” she asked. “Are people upset?”