Weekly Wrap 12.21.18: The 10 Best Stories You Missed This Week | Sojourners

Weekly Wrap 12.21.18: The 10 Best Stories You Missed This Week

1. VIDEO: Celebrating the Christmas Story at the Border

“One of the reasons that I take students and I take my family and I take anybody who will go along with me down to posada is that it’s fundamentally about nurturing the prophetic imagination, about seeing the world differently, seeing the world through the lens of a God who cares most deeply about the widow and the orphan and the stranger.”

2. 8 Things to Know About the Winter Solstice

Today is the shortest day of 2018. Thanks be to God.

3. Does My Soul Still Sing?

John Paul Lederach pens a beautiful series of Advent reflections that are an essential read.

4. Mary’s Magnificat Is Revolutionary. Some Evangelicals Silence Her.

D.L. Mayfield writes for Washington Post: “Mary, no longer just a silent member of the nativity, or a holy womb for God, or an obedient and compliant girl, has become the focal point for how I, and many other Christians, celebrate Christmas while living in the reality of waiting for true justice to come. She has helped me understand the true magnificence of how much God cares about our political, economic and social realities.”

5. Mourning the Loss of Kelly Stough

Rev. Sharon Risher’s mother and two cousins were shot and killed, along with six others, at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C. Here, she writes about the senseless shooting death of Kelly Stough, a black trans woman in Detroit, and the horrifying number of hate crimes against the transgender community.

6. These Priests Abused in Native Communities for Years. They Retired on Gonzaga’s Campus

For more than three decades, Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga’s campus served as a retirement repository for at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual misconduct that predominantly took place in small, isolated Alaska Native villages and on Indian reservations across the Northwest, an investigation by the Northwest News Network and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

7. A Quick Explainer for the Latest Government Shutdown Threats

Merry Christmas.

8. The Intentional Suffering Inflicted on Asylum Seekers

“This humanitarian crisis is not some inexorable product of human migration, as our government would have us believe, but the intended outcome of policies designed to keep asylum seekers from entering the U.S.”

9. The Best Facts I Learned from Books in 2018

The best way to pretend you made it all the way through your 2018 reading list.

May it be so.