Commentary

As a result of the political, religious, and moral crises we face today, both the soul of the nation and the integrity of faith are now at stake. This crisis is fundamentally about our chance and our choice of whether those who call themselves Christians are ready to go back to the teachings of Jesus, and whether such a call might be taken up by others beyond the churches. Many of us share a deep hunger for reclaiming Jesus instead of falling into more political polarization — we want theology to trump politics.

One year ago this week, I walked into the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, completing my pilgrimage there. This week I witnessed a different pilgrimage as about 100,000 people made their way to Mount Tabieorar, in Ogere Remo, Nigeria. They clothed themselves with white robes, took off their shoes, danced, sang, and prayed through the night and into the early morning with uninhibited joy. This was the 83^rd time the Tabieorar celebration has gathered in this holy space.

Many conservative Christians consider faith groups through one lens: what they lack. This doesn’t serve our efforts to be good neighbors, however. We also must remember that people of other faiths are image bearers of the same God, and because God hasn’t left himself without witness in the world (Rom. 1:20), they are equipped and capable of showing loving-kindness. And here’s the profound and provocative challenge today — because Jesus is present in their stories, it’s about time the church got to know these stories and learned how to be a part of them too.

What we need now is to #PrayfortheAmazon — to lament the devastation to the creatures and to our climate. We need to talk about the loss in our churches, singing and praying in community. Then we need to have the courage to mobilize and save what’s left of this beautiful world.

The Trump Administration has just taken its most consequential step to date to limit avenues to legal migration and permanent resident status in the United States.

Fear became slaveholder religion’s tool of control, inspiring millions of poor white families in the South to send sons to war and pray for victory, even as the white sons of plantation owners avoided combat. During Reconstruction, when black and white representatives worked together in Southern legislatures to guarantee public education for all people, many poor white children went to school for the first time; many poor white people received healthcare at Freedman’s Bureau hospitals. Still, their preachers told them to be afraid. Even when black power helped poor white people in measurable ways, slaveholder religion taught white people to fear shared power.

Bill Stringfellow’s declining health eventually had him leave New York and took him to Block Island. At one of the first speaking events I did as part of the early Sojourners, we met together at a conference on “radical discipleship” at Princeton Seminary. His voice was soft, and you had to incline your ears to hear him, but his biblical radicalism so powerfully resonated with me. I asked if we could talk and he suggested a walk around the Princeton campus – a walk that I will never forget. After our long walk, Bill said, “You should come visit on Block Island,” a place I had never heard of. So, I did, and “the island” as people here call it, has literally changed my life. Block Island became for me an almost monastic place for regular retreat and vacation, where the Bible and the newspaper are always held hand and hand.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a film of operatic intensity, poetic emotion, political clarity, and a touch of magic realism.

As we continue to enter deeper into the crisis of climate change, into the reality of human rights abuses and eruptions of violence happening not just here but all over the world, perhaps we need to take a different approach in our relationship to one another and our creature-relatives all over the earth.