There are people around the world for whom a century isn’t an abstract quantity: it’s the life they’ve lived, plus some. My grandfather, whose birthday is August 11, is one of those people. Robert N. Kennedy will spend Thursday celebrating his 102nd year with relatives and friends, trading memories, and reflecting on all he’s seen, done, and learned. […]
Family Memories
The 1980s-1990s phase of the AIDS epidemic in the United States gutted an entire generation that included Seventh-day Adventists. For many survivors, that period is a deeply traumatic memory: they lost friends and loved ones; many nursed friends through severe illnesses; and all of them faced a repelling, rejecting, and—to say the least—avoidant denomination. Church wasn’t […]
Research: LGBTQ Adventists, 18-35yo
Last spring, LGBTQ Andrews University students planned a bake sale to raise funds for a regional LGBTQ youth housing/anti-homelessness project. Thanks to off-campus attention, the students raised thousands of dollars from hundreds of donors around the US. Over a year later, Andrews University researchers are still contributing to this conversation in their own professional way. Curtis Vanderwaal, chair […]
Divesting in order to re-invest
When we move beyond our aspirational tales about fictive kinship and we-are-family, we gain the space to examine exactly what solidarity means.” —One of us“ When kinship hasn’t also meant solidarity, I’ve felt such a sense of betrayal. It just feels wrong when people I know I have a deep, existential relationship with use their energy to work against my thriving. The culture of […]
When Popular Analogies Steer Us Off-course
On Friday morning I eavesdropped on the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Annual Council meeting at the denomination’s headquarters in central Maryland. Several voices will live-report on the 8-day meetings via the Twitter hashtag #GCAC14: follow along over the next week. Mark Finley is an Adventist statesman, an internationally known Adventist speaker and elder. For most of the 1990s […]
On #NMOS14, Ferguson, and Rooting for a New World
This post took me three weeks to prepare. There’s so much to say, and the word-containers I’m drawing together feel far too narrow and too shallow to hold that “so much.” The community of Ferguson, MO, has been in grief since August 9, and that grief, first re-presented as aggression, then analyzed from afar, and dismissed by the […]