As we prepare to enter into the season of Advent tomorrow evening, how are you planning to hold this time sacred? What traditions do you hold?
What Are You Thankful For? Gratitude as a Way of Life
Joyce Hollyday is a co-founder and co-pastor of Circle of Mercy, an ecumenical congregation in Asheville, North Carolina as well as Word and World. She served for fifteen years as the Associate Editor of Sojourners magazine and is the author of several books, including Clothed with the Sun: Biblical Women, Social Justice, and Us and Then Shall Your Light Rise: Spiritual Formation and Social Witness.
I walk through the opening as the steel door clangs open and head toward the vending machines with my fistfuls of quarters. Nothing new, unfortunately. The same sugary, neon-colored sodas, salt-laden chips, and dry, mystery-meat sandwiches on bread as thin and tasteless as cardboard, wrapped in cellophane. But these will be my friend Wiley’s only chance at lunch. The prison doesn’t serve lunch on Saturdays. Continue reading “What Are You Thankful For? Gratitude as a Way of Life”
#BlackLivesMatter
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”
Something
by tom airey
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Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
Thomas Merton
Continue reading “Something”
Positioning by Rose Berger
Rose Berger is an award-winning religion journalist, author, public speaker, poet, and Catholic who specializes in writing about spirituality and art, social justice, war and peace.
Positioning
I didn’t count the rings
on the oak we took down
—crane and all—but think
there must have been a hundred
or more. I’d rather,
I’m sure, count the hairs
on your head
or finger the span
of your spine, my hand
on your smooth skin,
until we are old enough
to have limbs
that can no longer bear
the weight of a high wind
or surprise snow. Continue reading “Positioning by Rose Berger”
Idle No More
Continue reading “Idle No More”
Racism in the Age of Colorblindness
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”
We need to look toward women
“The one who finds wisdom finds life. To find wisdom, we need to look toward women clothed with the sun, who shine their light on our path and beckon us forward. They are in the Bible. They are among us as modern witnesses to the resurrection. And they are each of us, for we all carry a pearl of wisdom to add to life’s treasure.”
– Joyce Hollyday, Clothed with the Sun
An Invitation
From Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
It’s been two months since this blog went live and it has been a joy to read the stories and gather a circle of writers and activists to participate. Yet, there is so much still dreamt for what this could be. We invite you to join us in collaborating and giving life to this space. The words, questions, invitations, struggles, pondering, poetry, rememberings are uttered by a community crying out for justice from a biblical vision living within the empire of the day. This space is offered as gift with the hope of collective ownership. Continue reading “An Invitation”
Book Recommendation: Transforming Addiction
Victoria Marie, PhD, MDiv. is a Roman Catholic Woman Priest who studied Anthropology of Education at the University of British Columbia, attended seminary at Vancouver School of Theology, is a member of the Vancouver Catholic Worker and pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Tonantzin Community, Vancouver BC.“I know from my own experience as a member of a racialized group that racism, if internalized, can result in an individual seeing their identity as tainted. Even when negative self-conceptions are overcome, the tenacity of racism does not instil in those who are continuously injured by it the vision of a future that is different than the past.”
Continue reading “Book Recommendation: Transforming Addiction”
