Part of my do list this week has been to develop materials for an organizational partner. When an organization is learning how to offer substantive support to LGBTQ employees and their families, it may need some guidance on identifying what “support” actually means. Who defines the terms of support also matters: so much can go awry when programs […]
We leave no one behind
In the book Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, Angel Kyodo Williams explores spiritually grounded and grounding ways to live in a world where all is not well. Chapter 3 includes an analysis of the Three Pure Precepts: “to not create evil, to practice good, and to practice good for others.” These […]
The Moral Revival at Riverside
I spent yesterday evening at the Riverside Church, a nondenominational church with great Gothic arches and 80 years of practice supporting Christian social activism. Riverside is the church where in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared the war in Vietnam a moral failure. To this day, the church includes portraits of King, and a wing […]
Take action: An update on #NODAPL
Kandi Mossett of the Indigenous Earth Network shared a live update from Standing Rock today. She describes the way the National Guard, police from five states, Energy Transfer Partners, and the Dakota Access corporation have corralled indigenous people in camps near DA Pipeline construction. And she calls for trans-ethnic solidarity. [These states are] sending their […]
Freedom in West Virginia
Today’s blessing: talking about decentralized, leader-full movements, Ella Baker, and Bayard Rustin with Joan Browning, a former Freedom Rider and a member of the 20th Century civil rights movement’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Since yesterday, I’ve been in Browning’s county in West Virginia. I spoke to a local interfaith group this afternoon about the origins […]
How reaction can restrict us
A friend shared this quote from Gloria Anzaldúa this week: A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence… All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against… At some point on […]