The world-renowned leader of an environmental and indigenous rights group in Honduras has been killed. Berta Cáceres, General Coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for her work organizing indigenous Hondurans to successfully block the construction of the Agua Zarca Dam. Late on the night of March 2, two unidentified individuals broke down the door of the house where Cáceres was staying, shot, and killed her.
We cannot control or shape the place of our birth. It gives us our bounds for understanding ourselves on this earth. It is difficult to grow beyond our background to include others who are different within the scope of our compassion. Most often we are inclined to feel loyalty only to people who are similar to us in critical regards.
The Texas Department of Public Safety trooper who arrested Sandra Bland — a 28-year-old black woman who later was found dead in the Waller County jail — has been formally fired, three months after a grand jury indicted him on a perjury charge related to the arrest. For the Class A misdemeanor, Brian Encina faces a $4,000 fine and up to a year in the same jail where Sandra Bland died.
Without his community of his sisters and family, who have been mourning his death and questioning God for not saving their brother and friend, Lazarus would remain entombed. Without community, we remain bound and entombed. I’m not saying that our actions are as great as Jesus raising someone from the dead. But I am saying that God entrusts us with living into community, so that we may welcome our brothers and sisters out of death and into life.
"I'd say this album touches more on political issues. People are taking sides and drawing lines, tension is growing in all of the areas you mentioned and music has a unique way of speaking to those issues.
It can be natural to want to pull the reigns back or go back to what we know when things get tense, but we must keep moving forward; hold on to wisdom from our roots but know there is wisdom ahead as well."
The Rev. Cynthia Meyer said she was “called by God to be open and honest” about who she is. So, during her first sermon of 2016, Meyer broke the news: She loves another woman.
“I’ve been praying, and in a process of discernment for some time, particularly over the past few years, once I entered into a relationship,” said Meyer, pastor of Edgerton United Methodist Church.
In a landmark abortion case, the Supreme Court — which is down to eight justices — may be evenly split. With Antonin Scalia’s passing, the highest court in the land is now composed of four liberal justices, three conservatives, and the unpredictable Anthony Kennedy.
“Contaminated by the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God … the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner,” read Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, at a Georgetown University conference Feb. 29 on anti-Semitism in Europe.
“Now, if I told you that these were the words of a Hamas leader, or any number of Middle Eastern political officials, or movement leaders, you wouldn’t be very surprised,” he said.
“But these were the words of Jose Saramago, the Nobel Prize-winning author, as published in 2002 in El Pais, the paper of record of Spain.”
Witnesses also told Shaun King for the New York Daily News that the group “threw punches and kicked” other campaign rally attendees of color, and led the crowd in chants of “You’re scum, your time will come, you’re scum, your time will come.”
The Supreme Court takes up its most far-reaching case on abortion rights in nearly a quarter century March 2, with the fate of abortion restrictions in many states on the line. Depleted by the death last month of Justice Antonin Scalia, the eight-member court will consider a challenge mounted by Texas abortion clinics against a law that threatens to leave only 10 clinics operating in a state with 5.4 million women of reproductive age.