Commentary

I wish I could say that my journey into beekeeping began in some profound manner, especially as a person who has spent years working on policies that impact the environment and food security. But the truth is that I started playing The Sims 4 to keep myself entertained during the pandemic, and the game had a beekeeping feature. As I played, I thought, “I can do this.” And that is how my beekeeping journey began.

So when I read about people like Katie, one of many affirming parents who are leaving Texas because of the threat of having their transgender child taken from them, I think of the way the women at the tomb fled in fear. And when I hear Maddie, a trans girl in North Carolina, say, “If I didn’t have my hormones or my [puberty] blocker, I’d be very unhappy, and I wouldn’t want to leave the house sometimes,” I think of the disciples with the door locked on Easter evening.

Many of the white evangelical churches I have visited and grew up in framed Good Friday as a celebration. I have attended services that centered around dramatic skits or clips of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in order to evoke an emotional response. Another service treated Good Friday like a visitation where congregants were encouraged to reflect on their “friend Jesus” and share words of gratitude.

I admit that if you catch me on a bad day, I might join the chorus demanding that the government take aggressive action. As a former Catholic, I often contemplate how the law may have helped the Catholic Church hide its crimes against children. But in an effort to find some common ground, my position simply is that religious institutions should have to earn the exemptions in the same way that secular nonprofits do. This means that they would have to show how much money they bring in and how they spend it.

Do you ever just need a win? Have you ever just had the blues of the world hit you, causing you to stop and think to yourself, “I need something good right now or I’m gonna lose it”? Where do you normally turn? Perhaps you go outside, maybe you talk with some friends, or maybe you find comfort in literature and movies. These are better attempts to find some modicum of happiness than to look where I normally look: The world of sports.

Corporations, politicians, and other monied interests are often trying to find ways to derail organizing. The failed Amazon union drive back in April 2021 is certainly a notable example of this. Yet as labor scholar and activist Jane McAlevey points out, it’s also true that the reason the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union failed in Bessmer, Ala., was because they didn’t organize and incorporate support from local faith communities. McAlevey writes, “The media often played up the faith-based aspect of the campaign, with key staff of the effort being faith leaders or people of faith themselves. But there was a near-total absence of Bessemer or local Birmingham faith organizations on the endorsement list of the campaign.”

Copaganda refers to any piece of media that portrays police as a necessary social institution. While this can include viral videos of police chatting with neighborhood kids or doing lip-sync battles, the most pervasive examples of copaganda are found in pop culture.

March 31 marks the annual International Transgender Day of Visibility. I will confess that I only recently became aware of this day, which is “dedicated to celebrating the accomplishments of transgender and gender nonconforming people while raising awareness of the work that still needs to be done to achieve trans justice,” as GLSEN, an organization that advocates for LGTBQ issues in K-12 education, puts it.

As Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann has reflected, the imprecatory psalms put words to our thirst for vengeance. In praying these psalms, we process our rage and give our violent impulses over to God. “O God, break the teeth in their mouths,” one psalmist prays; “let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime” (Psalm 58:6, 8). I’m all for this kind of prayer. I’m all for praying the entire range of the psalms — even the ones that sometimes make us uncomfortable or aren’t necessarily welcome in church. And if there is any occasion for an imprecatory psalm, certainly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in all of its brutality and sheer horror, is one of those occasions.