I was grateful for the chance to be in Dayton, Ohio today for the Dayton Democracy Summit. You don’t have to listen to any media very long to know that democracy isn’t doing well in our world today - and, along with it, many everyday people are suffering.
But there are also people in every community who not only know something is wrong; they are ready to come together and do something about it because of their most deeply held convictions about what is right and wrong.
These are the kind of moral leaders who’ve been joining us at Moral Mondays, standing with immigrant neighbors, building new networks for mutual aid, and challenging companies that comply in advance with authoritarian demands.
I was glad to see many of these colleagues profiled in USA Today. As I told the reporter, preachers like me cannot be ministers in this moment and ignore what’s going on. If you can’t stand up now, when you’re talking about the death of the democracy, the death of human beings and the denial to the least of these, then you relegate yourself and your religion, your faith, as being terribly suspect.
You can read, “Pastors at a protest?” at USAToday.com or in today’s issue of the paper.
I’m glad to share this article and my message from today’s summit with you here on Our Moral Moment w/ Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
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This Wednesday at 12pm ET, we’ll have a live conversation with Christopher Hale, whose Letters from Leo — the American Pope & US Politics has been chronicling the moral witness of the new pope in public life. We had to reschedule this conversation a couple weeks ago when Substack’s platform was down; hope you can make plans to join us live on the app.
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