I hope you had a life-giving Easter weekend. For me, sadly, one of the key takeaways was that I shouldn’t eat so much candy all at once. But this week was also a time of reflection for me, largely about cycles of death and resurrection, despair and hope, exhaustion and renewal.
This past week I have wondered how incarcerated folks, including those wrestling with the legacy of Anselm’s theology, experience hope in the midst of confinement. Or how freedom fighters like journalist Maria Ressa envision new life while confronting systems of death. I have questioned whether institutions can be reborn, as Princeton Seminary reckons with controversy surrounding the ethics of one of its leaders. And while I don’t have a new article to link to for this one, I have also yearned to be reunited with loved ones who have passed on.
New video this week: another chat with my favorite poet Bonnie Thurston. She reads a new piece about the garden of Gethsemane and our complicated relationship with bearing one another’s burdens.
Email me: What does new life or resurrection look like to you this week?
“One student—the others call him Deacon, I later learned—asked if the word penance was related to penitentiary. I was excited: he saw a connection I also see, between atonement theology and the prison environment we were sitting in.”
“[PTS trustee board chairman Michael] Fisch’s private equity firm American Securities owns ViaPath, a prison telecommunications company that charges incarcerated people and their families as much as $15 for 15-minute phone calls to stay connected with their families, lawyers, and anyone outside the prison walls.”
“The job of a journalist is to call a spade a spade. If something is racist, if it’s homophobic, if it’s xenophobic, it’s our job to say that . . . to be as explicit as we can about it.”
