Community
[see all posts in this conversation on New Monastics and race.]
Jason and Vonetta Storbakken have extended a gracious and hopeful invitation to public dialogue about reconciliation's challenge for New Monasticism. I'd like to say in public what I've already said to them privately: Thank [...]
[see all posts in this conversation on New Monastics and race.]
Vonetta and Jason, first I want you to know that I am deeply grateful for the conversation you've invited and stirred with our private conversations and now
[see all posts in this conversation on New Monastics and race.]
In August 2006, before having ever heard the term "new monasticism," my husband, Jason, and I founded Radical Living, an intentional community in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. When I (Vonetta) was 12 years old, I emigrated from Guyana to [...]
There are plenty of times I miss running a legitimate ministry organization like Mission Year.
I just finished Jim Wallis’ thought-provoking editorial “A Real ‘Values’ Agenda” (January 2008).
Building a new politics on the old values of generosity, compassion, and community.
Barrios Unidos isn’t what most people would think of when they hear the phrase “faith-based organization.” Even though it’s not aligned with any church or traditional religi
Affordable housing is vital for working people- and for the health of our communities.
Wander into Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood on a Saturday morning in summer and you’ll see a sight not uncommon in New York City these days: a thriving and well-diversified farmers market.
Neighborhood denizens cluster around stands offering free-range meat, raw-milk cheese, cream-on-top milk, and a whole array of fresh fruit and vegetables—many of them grown right down the block from the market.
Yet unlike most of New York’s bustling greenmarkets, which tend to thrive in upscale residential and shopping areas, this one lies in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Red Hook’s median family income is $15,000—below the federal poverty line of $19,000. Forty percent of the neighborhood’s families live on less than $10,000 per year. The unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds stands at 75 percent.
In fact, not many outsiders wander into Red Hook. When New York City’s legendary city planner Robert Moses patched together plans for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the 1940s, he decided to spare aristocratic Brooklyn Heights and its stately brownstones, sending the BQE along the waterfront at that point. Just south, though, he let the road slice right into working-class Red Hook, leaving it shoehorned between a traffic-choked highway on one side and New York Harbor on the other.