Category: <span>Racial Justice</span>

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Earth Day Sunday

Since the first Earth Day 50 years ago, Christian communities have honored Earth Day Sunday: a chance for churches to celebrate Earth Day together in their houses of worship. This tradition has ecumenical, bipartisan roots.
Creation Justice Ministries, an ecumenical organization with a mission to educate, equip, and mobilize faith communities to protect, restore, and more rightly share God’s creation, equips faith communities with Earth Day Sunday materials on a different theme each year. Creation Justice Ministries’ board decides what the theme of the materials should be based on what they hear is most relevant in their communities.
2020 marks the beginning of a crucial decade of urgent climate action. According to the 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we must act now to ensure God’s creation can continue to sustain life.
For this reason, the 2020 Earth Day Sunday theme is: The Fierce Urgency of Now. The theme is based on the Martin Luther King quote:..

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Is Tech the New Way Forward for the Church? The Pros and Cons

During this moment when COVID-19 has sent some of us to our homes surrounding us with the need to Zoom our days away and sit in front of eye-damaging screens, I ponder the pros and cons of a technological age that could possibly become the new normal for many folks. My wonder goes to our churches that find themselves gathering around Facebook live instead of in their pews. Pastors and church staff learning how to edit videos and splice together meaningful services all at the same time trying to make it feel like “church”. Though technology is what we are forced to use in the current moment, is this new way forward? Will this stick and become a part of how we do church?
I along with many millennials think of my cell phone as essential. I also think that without the Internet I may go into complete shock and never recover. But as we’ve seen in the media and public discourse, millennials are 1.) often confused with Generation Z and 2.) are falsely accused of always being reliant on techno..

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National Poetry Month: Lynn Ungar

In light of April being National Poetry Month, every Monday in April, Unbound will publish a poem. I will select the poems, by nationally recognized poets, because they speak in one way or another to what we are all facing in light of pandemic.
In the first column, I shared my background and experience with poetry. I don’t need to do that again. As I share these poems, I remember what I learned many years ago as an undergraduate in my first poetry class: a good poem should, usually, be able to speak for itself and does not elaborate introduction before being read. In light of that wisdom, I will keep my introductions brief.
The second selection in this series is by Lynn Unger. It is a new poem written in March. Its timeliness is apparent. Lynn Unger is a Unitarian Universalist minister who lives in the San Francisco Bay area. I’m particularly fond of two other poems by Ms. Unger, “Camas Lilies” and “The Way It Is”. I appreciate Ms. Unger giving permission for me to reproduce her poe..

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The Arts and Justice Project Finalist

The Arts and Justice Project has chosen out of the amazing submissions these artists and writers as the top submissions this year. To view submissions, click on the picture of the artist or writer. Thanks to all who participated in the first year of the project. We look forward to next year!
Michael CuppettStations of the Cross
Sarah RutherfordTwo Faces in the System
Amy CernigliaThe song, Zephaniah, based on my favorite verse, Zephaniah 3:19
Noah WestfallThe poem, Vesuvius
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Catholic Social Thought and COVID-19

Catholic Social Thought (CST) gives us a measuring stick to assess our elected leaders and societal power structures: whether they enhance the life and dignity of the human person, especially the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized. In fact, we all will be judged based on how we respond to the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoner, and the stranger (Matthew 25:31–46).
By this Catholic measuring stick, our ongoing response to COVID-19 is falling short.
Consider first how our elected leaders distributed the economic burdens of this public health crisis. When the will of God is invoked to explain away death and suffering, Father Michael Himes retorts: “[W]ho votes on the expenditure and allotment of money and resources? God or us?” Congressional legislation that mandated temporary paid sick leave for workers impacted by the virus exempted large corporations with 500 or more employees. This and other exemptions left potentially 80% of American workers without any relief.
Much-needed cash ass..

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Second Great Depression or Second New Deal?

The Coronavirus economy demands swift and thorough action beyond the actions taken in the last financial crisis. Economists agree that we are heading into a coronavirus-induced recession. Optimists argue that the economy might bounce back once the health crisis is resolved. But if Covid-19’s course through the United States takes a slow trajectory—a successfully “flattened curve” from the epidemiologists’ perspective—then the economy may be effectively shut down for months. Closed borders and millions of people being forced to take unpaid leave will likely do severe, structural damage to the economy. Although the casualties might be less visible, a Second Great Depression might well take more lives than the virus itself.
After the 2008 crisis, the government bailed out banks but neglected to assist the individuals who had mortgages. Millions lost their homes. If the virus continues to shut down major events and disrupt workplaces, millions of renters will be unable to work and pay th..

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The Perpetual Foreigner Virus (PFV)

Like wildfire, the Covid-19 pandemic is racing to every corner of the earth, affecting all of humanity. With the death toll rising exponentially every day, who is not afraid of this angel of death? We are living in fear. Our anxieties are high. Home has become a quarantine space, a protection from terror. To flatten the curve, social distancing has become the new normal. None of us has seen anything like this in our lives. It’s completely unprecedented in living memory.
Yet President Donald Trump —the one who should be leading by example to keep the nation calm and informed—continues to insist on naming Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” or “the foreign virus.” He would use this racially charged term in every speech or tweet. It is troubling and utterly insensitive. His administration has been criticized for being slow to make sure that people get tested—and have access to tests to get tested—which can have deadly consequence. He refused to take any responsibility. Yet, he’s quick to make ..

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The Pandemic Unveiling

These feel like apocalyptic times. The streets that surround my apartment in Brooklyn are quiet. These streets are rarely quiet like this. Bars and restaurants are closed. The New York City schools finally closed. The “city that never sleeps” has slowed down so much that even young children, whose parents have shielded them from the news, realize something is off when they go outside for a walk. These are just the surface-level indications of a much more apocalyptic reality where people are losing jobs, the most vulnerable are impacted worst by this virus, our government is failing to act with appropriate speed and magnitude.
In Greek, the word “apocalyptic” (apokalypsis) means “unveiling.” This pandemic is unveiling the inequalities that have already been true, the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few that has already been true, the financial precariousness that many live in that has already been true. This pandemic is just unveiling in new and more urgent ways wha..

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Poems of the Pandemic

SpringIt is spring, the season of runny noses and sore
knees from slip-sliding down muddy hills sloughing
off snow in so much rain. The flies come buzzing
to the opening windows and the last frost snaps
even the lilies—winter is always a touch spiteful.
It is spring, and the daffodils and conspiracy theories
are tentatively blooming, splashing like handfuls
of sanitizer across the world to birdsong for twenty seconds
or whatever tune you don’t hate after the fortieth time
washing off the flu, coronavirus, fear of the elderly
and the compromised, anger of the poor that this too
will come for them and no one will stand in its way
to claim their lives matter—you see, whether they die
by bullets or bronchitis, we are still not bothered enough
to pass a bill, pay a tax, feed a child, save a life.
It is spring, when the earth stretches and yawns after
a lovely long nap, and I can only hope we listen to this
discordant symphony of change so that we, too, can
stretch beyond the life we thought..

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Hope and Death Row

In June, I left for Austin, TX to begin a summer of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). I settled quickly into a rhythm, spending my days in the medical and surgical intensive care units of the biggest hospital in Austin. The hardest cases for me were the ones that offered no way out. I froze every time a patient said I can’t imagine what comes after this. As if the patient were looking into an oncoming nothing. I called these crises of imagination, and they haunted me then. But I’ve since discovered that real hope is, in fact, born of imagining nothing. As the literary critic Terry Eagleton has famously pointed out, when King Lear gloats that “nothing will come of nothing,” he is phenomenally wrong. “Something,” Eagleton continues, “if it is finally to emerge, can do so only from the ruins of some illusory all.”
Hope, then, lives at the limits of what we can see, feel, and believe. In order to hope, we must be willing to imagine an oncoming nothing, the disintegration of this illusor..