From Nick Peterson (photo: far right), an adjunct instructor and worship planning coordinator at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He is pursuing ordination in the African Methodist Episcopal Church:

In South Central PA a group under the monicker #BlackLivesMatter717 has organized and given voice to issue of predatory racialized policing. In addition to leading training around non-violent direct action and carrying out various direct actions, the group is also committed to expanding the anti-racism on all fronts.
Continue reading “Hope Spills Over From 2014, Volume II” →

From the website of Church of All Nations in Minneapolis:

1. We confess the Church’s complicity in much of current and historic injustice. We do not detach ourselves from the past, but in grace and humility take responsibility for it.

2. We confess our sin both individually and collectively, including structural and systemic injustice, for unless we take collective responsibility, the ministry of reconciliation simply cannot be advanced.
Continue reading “A Provisional Understanding of Justice” →

Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope.
Cornel West

From Laurel Dykstra in Vancouver:

In March the Interfaith Institute for Justice Peace and Social Movements, a small collective of anti-racist people of faith, in Vancouver BC, launched Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson’s short film Hidden Legacies. The film tells about the resistance and resilience of young adults who are the children and grandchildren of Indian Residential School survivors. The event included a territorial welcome, prayers, tears, hip-hop, cello, and hard questions from children. In collaboration with First Nations teachers, the film is being prepared for use in high schools. In the fall the film was premiered in Surrey, BC with a mostly South Asian audience and panel who drew connections between very different colonial legacies.

Continue reading “Hope Spills Into 2015” →

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Martin Luther King, Letter From A Birmingham Jail (1963)

Highlights from social media in the wake of the Ferguson Uprising (graphic by Eric Mar):
Continue reading “#BlackLivesMatter” →

From Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012):

When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners–and wished them well–nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation… Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system…
Continue reading “Racism in the Age of Colorblindness” →