Sr. Helen Prejean, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, is the face of Ministry against the Death Penalty and author of Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions. She has been mobilizing people to take action against legal executions in the United States for more than […]
Coding for the Community: A Conversation with Teagan Widmer
I met Teagan about three years ago. She had just graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a compelling thesis on the representation of transgender women in film. After moving back to the Left Coast, she started learning computer programming languages on her own and in Bay Area coding collectives. Teagan recently hit the news with […]
From the Kansas State Constitution
Sec. 1 – Equal rights All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Sec. 2 – Political power; privileges All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and are instituted for their equal protection […]
Raise a Fist: On Saluting the Humane
Real peace is more than the absence of war. Rather, we need to change the culture, situations, and systems that lead to violence. —American Friends Service Committee Five years ago I’m sitting behind the bar of a House of Representatives committee room, Washington, D.C. It’s a mark up day, when the committee meets to comment […]
Storify: Who Is My Neighbor?
Misanthropes and philanthropists enjoy the same sunlight and we’re naturally interdependent with other living and non-living aspects of our ecosystem. Our ecosystem includes human systems too—families, governments, ethnic-cultural groups, religions, and economic models. Even when we have individual preferences about these things, the dominant models in our environment still affect us. Someone who never builds […]
Speaking as Myself
My friend Teagan hosted a really powerful conversation this weekend about what it means to be an ally to a community and how to speak with its members rather than for or in place of them. [1] I come into the ally/narrative conversation shaped not just by my direct experiences but also by the body of narratives that […]