Read more at sojo.net ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ View this email in your browser [[link removed]] [[link removed]] How Will Christians Answer This Moment in History?
[[link removed]] The writer James Baldwin stated in 1962, “It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred.”

It is the truth that to be a person of faith in America today is to recognize that America desires Jesus slogans over morally grounded Jesus-inspired action.

America as a nation stands on the precipice of what Rev. William Barber refers to as “the third reconstruction,” a moment in history when the zeitgeist of the nation clashes with the myth of our history. The nationwide unrest, witnessed from Maine to California, is part of America’s reckoning with a lie this nation has refused to acknowledge. As a nation, racialized thinking and white supremacy is part of not only our history, but saturates all of our institutions. I will not bore you with historical details, but scholars such as Michelle Alexander, Ibram X. Kendi, Carol Anderson, and Richard Rothstein make the case powerfully that America has a spiritual malady supported by institutions that either aggressively promote these ideals or willfully ignore their reality. Our national reckoning and possible reconstruction rest at the epicenter of this myth many courageously today seek to exorcise from our body politic.

Portland and cities such as Chicago, where I live, work, and serve, offer an additional challenge to people who want to be free of the lie that comes with loving whiteness over ethnicity and power over democracy. One must understand whiteness is a socially constructed identity, created in reaction to Blackness. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is a culturally rooted identity of shared story, music, and usually, good food. One quickly sets up a hierarchy. The other sets a table and tells stories enabling people to struggle to find common chords in the collective human enterprise.

Federal troops being sent to Portland, and possibly Chicago, complicates the movement for Black lives.

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[[link removed]] From the MagazineBorderlands (by Kristin Berkey-Abbott)
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A poem.

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The Road to Joy: Eight Pathways of Psychospiritual Transformation
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Unique Pastoral Opportunity in Ferguson, Missouri
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