I’m rereading a chapter of James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree in advance of a welcoming churches retreat in Washington, D.C. this week. Chapter 2 discusses White American Christianity’s inability to see Jesus in the Black people that White Christians lynched between the 1880s and the end of World War II. Cone focuses mostly […]
Beyond the singular self
Justice is love in public.” —Cornel West Courage is grace under pressure.” —Ernest Hemingway Over the last few years, I’ve talked with hundreds of people who believe that Christians shouldn’t be concerned about politics, law, or the fate of the world, and yet have been trained to watch carefully for signs of “the last days.” […]
Rituals reveal who we are
Ritual practices are intentions made material or concrete. Our ritual practices matter because they don’t just represent the commitments we openly acknowledge or declare. Habits reflect our implicit intentions as well. Policies are the material expressions of our core values. Budgets are a way to externalize priorities using the unit that this culture seems to […]
Risking injury for justice
This evening’s reports are that 3.6-4.3 million people or more gathered in major cities across the United States and thousands more gathered worldwide, all in solidarity with the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. The Women’s March movement has had some major hiccups since its birth in the pro-Clinton secret Facebook group Pantsuit Nation. I’ve shared […]
A poetic break
My latest literary companion, Umair Muhammad’s Confronting Injustice, features a sentence that was so arresting that I had to look up both the source and its author. (Get Confronting Injustice the way I did, via Haymarket Books.) Eduardo Galeano wrote through the second half of the 20th Century about the political struggles of his native Uruguay. […]
Communities brave enough to feel in
Justice work can be exhausting. No one who has worked on an intractable social issue for any extended length of time would be surprised by that statement. As much as it’s common knowledge that social activism can mean feeling sorrow or pain over suffering, it isn’t at all common to have teams that will hold […]
