kathy khang
I MET KATHY KHANG last summer. She joked about turning to Korean face masks and wine in her times of need; I immediately thought to myself that we’d really get along. Fortunately, her expertise in crafting both engaging conversation and knockout tweets (@mskathykhang) translates well into her latest book, Raise Your Voice: Why We Stay Silent and How to Speak Up.
Khang, who emigrated from Korea to the U.S. as a child, has worked in various settings, including newsrooms and university campus ministries. She brings her journalism and ministry experience to activism, recognizing that social justice always involves multiple intersections of race, gender, orientation, faith, politics, and more.
Raise Your Voice is an authentic diagnosis of, and antidote to, the deafening silence from many women and minorities in the workplace, politics, the world, and, most potently, in our spiritual and worship spaces. Khang crosses social, cultural, professional, and generational boundaries to create a tool useful to anyone who has ever felt either like they didn’t have a voice, or that their voice was taken from them.
I USED TO BE in the business of making moving and packaging supplies, as well as kindling.
Yes, I was a newspaper reporter. The demise of print news has been alleged for decades, and though I no longer am a newspaper reporter, I still turn to my pile of semi-read news to help me the start the occasional fire.
I’m not sure what category book authoring falls under, but it certainly feels riskier than print news. Perhaps that’s why it took me so long to drum up the courage and time to put it all down. A newspaper story has a shelf life of about 12 to 48 hours, depending on the news cycle, and then it can literally be recycled. These days—with Twitter and a thumb-happy resident in a famous white house—it seems the news cycles even faster. Critique of digital news can be brutal, but it’s also fast. A book takes much more time to read, never mind the time it takes to write, and one of my fears is that time opens up space for critique.
Kathy Khang speaks at the session April 13 at the Festival of Faith and Writing. RNS photo by Emily McFarlan Miller
The panel of Christian women writers described the night Donald Trump won the presidency as, in the words of one, “a nightmare.”
“As the numbers rolled in, [there was] just this sense of this nightmare is really true – our family, the body of Christ, is actually going to vote in a way that dehumanized our presence here in this country,” said Sandra Maria Van Opstal, a second-generation Latina and the executive pastor of Grace and Peace Community in Chicago.
Rev. Yvonne Delk blesses Dr. Larycia Hawkins at Sojourners' 2016 Summit for Change.
Jim turned to me and said: “We’re greedy — seeking a second blessing.”
I smiled wryly: “This is my third.”
Paper cutouts of men in various colors. Photo via RNS/courtesy mtkang via Shutterstock
Asian-American Christians are voicing concerns over how they’re depicted by white evangelicals, most recently at a conference hosted by Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California.
Saddleback recently hosted a conference by Exponential, a church-planting group, and a video last Tuesday left some Asian-Americans offended.
It’s the second dust-up in as many months involving Asian-Americans and Warren, who spoke at the Exponential conference. Last month he received backlash from Asian-American Christians after he posted a Facebook photo depicting the Red Guard during China’s Cultural Revolution. “The typical attitude of Saddleback Staff as they start work each day,” the caption read on Sept. 23.
Awesome people. Vegetarians. Going mute. Here's a little round up of links from around the Web you may have missed this week:
- Awesome people hanging out together.
- An alternative to abortion.
- Take a walk in Milan.
- Are you a new vegetarian? Some tips.
- Tom Hanks addresses Yale graduates.
- Kathy Khang shares more about her experience with depression.
- Simple and powerful: forgive.
- Don't you sometimes wish you could just hit the mute button?
- Sojourners' Enuma Okoro on Pentecost:
"Pentecost is God's 'show-and-tell' lesson that after the incarnation no one people has a purchase on the fullness of God. No single denomination, no one race, no one ethnicity, and no one socioeconomic group mediates God's fullness to the world. Diversity is an essential attribute of a Spirit-filled church (Acts 2:8,18)."