I first logged onto the internet in 1998. That year I also stumbled across White supremacist networks, and I backed away from their dumpster fires as quickly as I could. I also kept the lessons they demonstrated for me. Effective organizing requires that people have direct access to information, regardless of their education status, and direct […]
Without reservation
Student leaders at Pacific Union College (PUC) have published a remarkable statement affirming the diversity within their campus’ student body. The undated statement, signed by twenty students who consider themselves “representatives of the future generations of leaders in the Seventh-day Adventist church,” commits them to standing on campus and in their communities with women, LGBT+ […]
Dusting off some seats
Who gets to declare a cultural debate over? According to a recent RNS column, late debate participants, critics, and allies to those directly impacted by the issues being debated are the ones who get to declare differences “unbridgeable” and the debate itself a draw. I find this fascinating, and perhaps you will too. In order: […]
An unrecognized voice
As Walter Brueggemann argues in Sabbath as Resistance, contemporary US culture is based on excessive production. “Our motors are set to run at brick-making speed,” he writes, alluding to the ancient Hebrews in the Exodus stories who made bricks with and without straw, at and beyond quota, so they could meet their enslavers “insatiable” demands […]
A new song
The first time I ever wrote a letter someone who was incarcerated, I was in Jamaica and in my late teens. My correspondent, the son of a friend of my mother, still had a few more years to go before he was eligible for parole. I’m not sure of our mothers’ motivations for asking us […]
How the system eats people
I first learned about hydroelectric power in primary school, when along with solar and wind it seemed like our best answer to the energy needs of the future. My school books didn’t tell me about the human costs. In the United States, the dams of the Penobscot River fouled waters that the Penobscot Nation had fished […]
