Commentary

1. Why Alaska's Lisa Murkowski Isn’t Afraid of Donald Trump

She won her seat as an independent write-in. She enjoys wide support from Alaskan Democrats, centrist Republicans, and Alaska Natives. Meet Lisa Murkowski, one of the Republican Senators who has staunchly opposed the GOP health care bill.

2. I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction

The producers of HBO’s massively popular “Game of Thrones” are following up their fantasy hit with a rewriting of history: “Confederate,” a show that envisions what America would be like had the South won the war. The project idea has sparked significant backlash — here, Roxane Gay digs into why.

Under the Trump administration, ICE has requested an additional $185.9 million to recruit more than 1,600 new ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers, Homeland Security Investigations agents, and additional support personnel. This is part of a larger 1.6 billion ICE request that would also include funding for the new border wall and detention beds.

In the recollections of many evangelicals, America was then a tranquil, moral land deeply rooted in a specific set of traditional Christian values: the shining city on the hill, an idyllic small-town nation dominated by a white male leadership group.

The most religious states — a comparison based on questions like church attendance, identity, and prayer frequency — more often than not coincide with the poorest states, the states with lowest life expectancy, and the states where it is most dangerous to be LGBTQ and/or a person of color.

Early this month, the Mennonite Church USA succeeded overwhelmingly in passing a resolution in support of peace and justice in Israel/Palestine — and it was no easy feat. As an eyewitness and active participant to the activities leading up to this landslide vote, I can tell you the road there was tough, agonizing, and expensive.

Art and Christianity give our lives import and meaning, irrespective of power, race, gender or class. Jesus did this when he overturned the Greek and Roman way of viewing the world, in which one’s social status was everything, and introduced the notion of the equal worth and dignity of all human beings. “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all (Col. 3:11),” wrote Paul. All people made in the image and likeness of God, “lovely in limbs."

We live in a world full of extremists. It is not just in American society that the battle between extreme beliefs on either end of the spectrum is happening constantly in our political, social, and religious circles. Violence, hate crimes, and acts of oppression erupt all over the world, and through the news and social media, we are witnesses to the distress calls of the people who are caught in the middle of these battles

What we’ve learned three years after Eric Garner’s death is that we can’t give up on God’s mandate for justice, incarnated in the gospel’s good news. If we trust and believe that selfish agendas of special interests will not prevail, we are compelled instead to believe that love will conquer hate.

Help them understand they have a voice.

Elizabeth Brandt, a mom and a participant of the play-in, takes her young daughters to her senators’ office. She believes she believes this will lay a foundation for her daughter to speak up throughout her life.

“She may not have the most articulate things to say — last year when she was three she asked them not to throw trash in the ocean which our senators don’t do — but she’s learning that she has a voice in this process and that’s about the most important thing,” said Brandt.