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 […]
The stickiness of identity
When I first started talking with my family about sexuality and gender, I got a lot of push-back over how I described myself and how I didn’t describe myself. “Straight” or “heterosexual” were terms my relatives were willing to compute. They also understood “lesbian,” even if they refused to engage it. But “fluid”? “Bisexual”? They weren’t familiar with […]
Changing the world and still preserving agency
Terry Pratchett was a prolific English writer and a keen observer of social dynamics. His major work, the Discworld novel series, explored human nature and sociology through the eyes of marginal social figures: librarians, trainee magicians, elderly country witches and wise women, and even DEATH HIMSELF. (The all-caps in the previous sentence are entirely appropriate in […]
What compels the justice worker
I recently wrote that Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” is a faith song, not a fact song. It declares a hope for a different world in the midst of bruising experiences. As someone shaped by reading Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X and then watching Spike Lee’s film interpretation of it, I respond to Cooke’s […]
The ways we participate
One of my favorite extended analogies in the Christian scriptures is Church as Body. It’s an analogy that represents a collective as a dynamic organism rather than as a mechanical device. It assumes that there are many roles to play, not just one for all, and that each role well-played advances the well-being of the whole. […]
Just do something
International tragedies come to popular consciousness so often now, we know what to expect: a wave of public thoughts and prayers, followed by criticism of those thoughts and prayers, and criticism of the criticism until attention dissipates or there’s another international tragedy to move toward. One of the most pointed critiques of the cycle came […]