A meditation on the Common Peace Community by Nancy Bean
Jesus turns the water to wine at the wedding banquet. Jesus tells the story of a banquet that the rich and important folks decline and that is full of the poor and the lame and the blind. Jesus overseas the spread for the fish and loaves banquet for the hungry peasants on the hill. Jesus is condemned for eating and drinking with sinners. Jesus shares the bread and wine banquet with his disciples on the night before he is betrayed. He invites them to eat and drink the banquet of God’s body whenever they get together. Jesus is known not as he speaks with his discouraged friends on the road to Emmaus but in the breaking of the bread.
The banquet is the kingdom. Eating together is both sign and reality of God’s community. Hunger is both sign and reality of our alienation from God.
Jesus prays over the scarce bread and fishes and then commands the disciples to feed the crowd. And bounty abounds. God’s economy and God’s reign is the banquet where everyone is fed.
Should we be so bold as to pray “Thy Kingdom come on earth?” Should we be so bold as to make our personal choices and our church mission and our political alignments about making sure everyone is welcome and fed at the table? Should we be so bold as to lay our basket of bread on the table as if God is the master of this abundant feast?
Friends of Justice launches the Common Peace Community Initiative with our new curriculum “Breaking the Silence.” Contact us for more information and invite us to your small group in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Your gift of $50 a month will fund a six week study … Continue reading Friends of Justice launches the Common Peace Community Initiative
We talk a lot about Operation Streamline at Friends of Justice because it highlights the human cost of mass deportation. This recent article from the Washington Post presents both sides of the debate.
Supporters of Operation Streamline appeal to the obvious: people who enter the United States illegally are criminals by definition and must live the consequences. If we are to continue as a sovereign nation we must defend our borders.
But anyone who has sat through one of these humiliating “cattle call” hearings knows it isn’t that simple. Most of the men and women who cross the border illegally are driven by a desperation few Americans can fathom. Placed in their shoes, we would do the same without reservation or remorse.
The Post piece ends with a poignant vignette from a recent deportation hearing in Tucson that illustrates the moral dilemma perfectly: (more…)
There are a holy host of great arguments for reforming our nations’ immigration laws.
Latino voters flexed their muscles in the last presidential election, convincing many Republicans that you can no longer win the White House without winning at least 40% of that demographic.
People of faith, including a well-organized cohort of evangelical leaders, recognize the deep disconnect between prevailing immigration policy and the biblical mandate to care for the stranger.
The Chamber of Commerce and most business leaders favor immigration reform because the economy requires a willing, hard working, motivated workforce. Since a genuine clampdown on the undocumented would ruin states like Texas, a pathway to citizenship and legal status for America’s eleven million undocumented workers just makes sense.
These arguments made it possible for the Senate to pass a reform package which, though deeply flawed, represents an improvement over the status quo. (more…)
Why do some ethnic groups do so much better in America, on average, than others? For instance, why do Cuban immigrants often outperform Mexicans or Puerto Ricans? And why do immigrant families from India experience greater success than, say, the Vietnamese?
Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenstein, think they know the answer. American winners are tapping into what the authors call “the triple package”:
1) They believe themselves to be superior to other groups while 2) remaining deeply insecure about their place in American society. And 3) they all impose an extraordinary sense of self-discipline on their children.
The reaction to this thesis has been swift. Some are calling this tendency to separate winner cultures from losers “the new racism”.
In TIME, Suketu Mehta points out that most immigrant families from places like India and Nigeria enter America laden with capital, cultural and otherwise. These families are culled from the upper 1% of their native population and have a long list of advantages and opportunities to hand down to their children.
In an Atlantic article, Olga Kazan pokes holes in the author’s theory in exhaustive detail.
I have chosen to share Hector Tobar’s critique from the Los Angeles Times with you, largely because Tobar was the first journalist from a flagship newspaper to cover the Tulia (more…)
Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed bipartisan sentencing legislation that represents a major move away from the lock-em-up policies of the past three decades. This happened after Eric Holder, representing the Obama administration, called for sweeping reform.
The Obama administration, stepping up its efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system, called Thursday for the early release of more low-level, nonviolent drug offenders from federal prisons.Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, speaking to the New York State Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section, said the administration wants to free inmates who no longer pose a threat to public safety and whose long-term incarceration “harms our criminal justice system.” He appealed to defense lawyers to identify candidates for clemency.
“You each can play a critical role in this process by providing a qualified petitioner — one who has a clean record in prison, does not present a threat to public safety, and who is facing a life or near-life sentence that is excessive under current law — with the opportunity to get a fresh start,” Cole told the lawyers.
His remarks were part of a broader prison reform effort by the Justice Department. In August, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that low-level drug offenders with no connection to gangs or large-scale drug organizations would no longer be charged with offenses that called for severe mandatory sentences. President Obama later commuted the sentences of eight inmates serving a long time for crack cocaine convictions.
Each of them had served at least 15 years and had been convicted before the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which sought to reduce the sentencing disparity between those convicted of crack and powder cocaine crimes.
“The president’s grant of commutations for these eight individuals is only a first step,” Cole said Thursday. “There are more low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who remain in prison, and who would likely have received a substantially lower sentence if convicted of precisely the same offenses today.”
It’s unclear how many inmates could qualify for clemency, but thousands of federal inmates are serving time for crack cocaine offenses.
Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, applauded Cole’s announcement.
“The Obama administration is taking an important step toward undoing the damage that extreme sentencing has done to so many in our criminal justice system,” said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office.
In other action Thursday on criminal justice reform, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance a bill, sponsored by Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), that would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug offenders by half and allow 8,800 federal inmates imprisoned for crack cocaine crimes to return to court to seek punishments in line with the Fair Sentencing Act.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the panel, called the legislation “a step backward.” In a statement, he cited a letter sent to Holder from the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys that said “the merits of mandatory minimum sentences are abundantly clear.”
“They provide us leverage to secure cooperation from defendants. . . . They protect law-abiding citizens and help to hold crime in check,” the group said.
Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, called the bill “bipartisan and reasonable” and said it would “save taxpayers billions of dollars by locking up fewer nonviolent drug offenders for shorter periods of time.”
Holder, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, said federal prison costs represent one-third of the Justice Department budget. He called the enormous costs of overburdened prisons “a growing and potentially very dangerous problem.”
The cost of incarceration in the United States was $80 billion in 2010. The U.S. population has grown by about a third since 1980, but the federal prison population has increased by about 800 percent and federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent over capacity, Justice officials said.
Joseph Mathews is a writer and public speaker who is currently working on his doctorate in urban youth culture and education at Columbia University. I met Joseph at an organizing meeting at Friendship West Baptist Church in Dallas in 2007. When he learned that I had been the first outsider to organize in Jena, Louisiana, he asked if he could visit the community with me. He was interested in shooting a documentary. When he met some of the Jena 6 defendants it took him about ten seconds to get them rapping. In the picture to the left, Joseph is filming their impromptu performance.
My response to the Richard Sherman post-game rant differs from Joseph’s. For one thing, I have followed Michael Crabtree’s career since he played at Texas Tech and didn’t like hearing his talents impugned. To me, Sherman sounded more like a professional wrestler than a football player. Moreover, he was giving full, uncut expression to the hyper-competitive aspect of American athletics that has always repelled me.
But my first thought was, “Oh, no, the haters are going to have a field day with this.” Which, of course, they did.
Joseph identifies with Sherman at a much deeper level than I do because he shares so much of Sherman’s experience. Growing up as a gifted athlete who initially struggled academically, Joseph has experienced prejudice and rejection firsthand.
When we were driving out of Jena after the big rally in September of 2007, Joseph kept saying, “Doc, could you slow down just a little bit?”
When I explained that we were just a couple of ticks over the speed limit, he said, “Doc, how many times have you been pulled over by the police?”
“Two or three times,” I replied.
“And why did they pull you over?” he asked
“Because I was way over the speed limit,” I admitted. “How many times have you been pulled over?”
“Thirty three times,” Joseph stated flatly, “and it is almost always for nothing.”
This deeply divergent life experience influences perception at a basic level.
Joseph Mathews is right: in the vernacular lexicon, “thug” has replaced the n-word. No one is going to call you a racist for characterizing Richard Sherman as a thug. As this interview clearly demonstrates, Sherman is a well-spoken, highly educated young man. He also grew up on the mean streets of Compton, New Jersey, and those streets will be with him to the day he dies.
It wasn’t five minutes after I posted my thoughts on Facebook that many of my white childhood Facebook friends went in on me about him. Their comments were so full of hate I had to rewind my TiVo to make sure that I had not missed something, like him shooting or stabbing another player. As I began reminiscing about what it was like to be black and playing sports while growing up in Oklahoma, this country’s most conservative and what many would argue one of the most racist states in America, my memories were haunting. I have seen more than my share of young black males killed, incarcerated, discriminated against, harassed and criminalized in the name of being a thug, including myself. And the comments being made on my page represented the larger narrative going on simultaneously around the country and the feeling of many people in very low and high places.
Man! Richard I wish you would have told them that you graduated 2nd in your class from a high school in Compton and went to Stanford where you graduated with a 3.9 GPA! I wish you would have told them you were working on your Masters Degree! I wish you would have told them that you were not a thug but a hero to your hood because despite the odds, you accomplished your dreams! This is what I was thinking they should have had him saying as I sat in front of my TV and watched the Beats by Dre Head Phones commercial that set the stage for what was about to transpire around the country. During the NFC championship game between the Seattle Seahawks and the San Francisco 49ers, as the reporter on the commercial said to him “what do you think of being known as a thug around the league?” I shook my head as he just put his head phones on, because I knew what was coming. NFL defensive back Richard Sherman’s character was about to be assassinated, he was about to become the latest victim of the dreaded New N-Word “Thug”.
The racist venom reached a fever pitch after he gave the post-game interview. I watched as negative comment after negative comment poured in – every last one of them questioning his character and calling him every name in the book, stopping just short of calling him the “N” word. But the foundation had already been laid. They could not get away with calling him a no good “N”, but they could get away with calling him a no good “Thug” which was the word of choice being used to characterize him nationally. Unlike the painful racially charged N-Word, which carries much historical baggage, the usage of the “T” word is not publicly frowned upon at all nor is it politically incorrect, and in many cases its used to justify the mistreatment and criminalization of black youth.
This guilt by characterization and classification mindset has been at the center of many recent racial controversies that have resulted in those who committed acts of violence against unarmed black youth being free to walk away, because in death the victim’s character was put on trial, and in life they were all found guilty of being thugs, which in the court of public opinion is punishable by death. You see, no one really cares about what happens to kids that are not fully viewed as human beings, who are guilty of something. But I think it would be an insult to the intelligence of those who now know Richard Sherman’s background and continue to call him a thug. Because I truly believe that they realize he is not a thug. They know exactly what they are saying and where their hearts truly are. They understand very well that people are treated like they are viewed, and that historically the practice of stripping away young black male’s humanity, through giving them names that automatically cast a shadow of guilt and suspicion over them, makes them more susceptible to harassment and discriminatory practices. Now that the word thug has taken on a new meaning, white folks who continue to call black kids thugs, and young men like Richard Sherman thugs, are really saying we don’t care how smart and educated you are, how much money you make, or how great you are at doing something we love, we still hate you and you’re still a “N”. We’ll just change the n-word to “thug”.
The indiscriminate labeling of black males as thugs has created an atmosphere of disdain and insensitivity and has made them targets of crime with very slim chances that they will get justice, compassion and least of all protection under the law. In the name of neutralizing so-called thugs, police have been allowed to shoot and kill unarmed black men like Oscar Grant and trigger happy citizens have been allowed to get away with with murdering unarmed children like Trayvon Martin.
The reality is that most people who subscribe to this white supremacist ideology don’t believe that Richard Sherman is a thug, but they do want him to be guilty of something because that would reinforce the negative raciest stereotypes of young black males that they hold onto to feel better about themselves. Richard Sherman is not guilty of being a thug. He is guilty of being something much more dangerous. He’s guilty of making certain white people uncomfortable. He is young, black, rich, educated, and cocky, feels he is the best, and is the best at what he does. But worst of all he is not afraid to let the world know. That is why in many ways Richard Sherman simultaneously represents the American dream and the American nightmare. He has the bravado, drive, and leadership abilities that are often touted as quintessentially American, BUT one of America’s greatest fears is for one of its black athlete’s (i.e. Mohamed Ali, Jim Brown, Paul Robeson ) to use their influence and platform to speak out against injustice and inequality. Richard Sherman has the potential to be that athlete. If they neutralize him with the “T” word before he recognizes his true potential then their fears will be put to rest — for now. So be careful not to think too much of yourself or you might be the next “N” Word, I mean thug.
The basic thrust of the Imago Dei Campaign will not come close to satisfying liberals, but it is an excellent beginning.
It is frequently assumed that when Pope Francis talks about God’s love for gays, atheists and other traditionally demonized demographics, he is backing away from traditional Catholic teaching. Not so. Whatever his personal views may be, Pope Francis must hue to the established party line. That’s what popes do.
In Francis we see a pronounced shift in tone and emphasis. Hard line liberals aren’t impressed. After all, they say, Francis still believes that homosexuality does not reflect the creative intention of God, and he affirms his church’s absolute opposition to abortion under any circumstances. So why is everybody so excited?
We’re excited because the world’s most prominent religionist is publicly celebrating God’s love for all humanity. God loves everybody, all the time, no matter what. That’s what a shift in tone and emphasis looks like.
Similarly, Sammy Rodriguez, evangelists like James Robison, and the good folks at Focus on the Family can’t back away from their established positions on gay rights and abortion. To do so would instantly end careers and destroy the prominent institutions these men are associated with.
But they have done what people in their position can do. They have acknowledged the humanity of their ideological opponents. They have admitted that every person on every side of our futile culture war debate is a child of God and thus worthy of respect.
We can’t have a conversation until these affirmations are made by people of good will on both sides of the cultural and religious divide.
Rev. Rodriguez, the official voice of Imago Dei (Image of God), is right about one thing; young people, conservative and liberal, have had enough of the culture war.
Gays are created in the image of God. So are liberals. The rich. The undocumented. Unbelievers. Everyone, even, and most importantly, the people with whom you do not agree.
That’s the message of the Imago Dei Campaign, a new movement of prominent evangelical groups launched on Monday to erode the culture war battle lines that have helped define evangelical discourse for the better part of half a century. The Imago Dei, or Image of God, pledge is simple: “I recognize that every human being, in and out of the womb, carries the image of God; without exception. Therefore, I will treat everyone with love and respect.” (more…)
I was deeply moved by this poetic essay by Langston Hughes. That might seem odd to you. Hughes could never get comfortable with religion, and Salvation gives us a big part of the reason. My life and work has been shaped by a religious vision from the beginning. Yet I find an important piece of my own spiritual biography in this story.
Unlike Langston Hughes, I never “went forward” in response to evangelistic appeals, although, to be honest, the churches of my childhood never worked that hard to get me to “the front”. I was twenty-two when I was baptized. By that time I realized that, for me at least, there would be no flashing light from heaven, no strange warming of the heart. I went forward because I loved Jesus and wanted to serve him.
Hughes describes the evangelistic fervor of his childhood congregation with tender affection. He loved these people and wanted to honor them. The brand of “come to Jesus” socialization described in Salvation, while a formative influence in many American lives, can bear bitter fruit in the most honest and sensitive souls. It has very little meaningful relation to the Jesus of the Bible, and it glamorizes a species of religious experience that is foreign to all but a few.
Social conformity and Christian discipleship are antithetical concepts. At least they should be.
Only by staying in his seat could Langston Hughes have honored a God of truth and integrity; but that kind of courage is beyond the reach of even the most stalwart children. Martin Luther King Jr., the man we honored yesterday, was able to remain in the Christian fold because he found a Jesus, rooted in the prophetic biblical tradition, who understood his passion for justice. The same goes for me.
Langston Hughes was not so fortunate. But you’d never get a critique of old school evangelism this poignant from inside the community of faith. Langston may not have know it, but his unswerving honesty was inspired by a gracious God. Langston Hughes may never have found God (we’ll have to take his word for that), but read Salvation and you know God found Langston. Maybe that’s all that matters.
Salvation
By Langston Hughes
I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved. It happened like this. There was a big revival at my Auntie Reed’s church. Every night for weeks there had been much preaching, singing, praying, and shouting, and some very hardened sinners had been brought to Christ, and the membership of the church had grown by leaps and bounds. Then just before the revival ended, they held a special meeting for children, “to bring the young lambs to the fold.” My aunt spoke of it for days ahead. That night I was escorted to the front row and placed on the mourners’ bench with all the other young sinners, who had not yet been brought to Jesus.
My aunt told me that when you were saved you saw a light, and something happened to you inside! And Jesus came into your life! And God was with you from then on! She said you could see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul. I believed her. I had heard a great many old people say the same thing and it seemed to me they ought to know. So I sat there calmly in the hot, crowded church, waiting for Jesus to come to me.
The preacher preached a wonderful rhythmical sermon, all moans and shouts and lonely cries and dire pictures of hell, and then he sang a song about the ninety and nine safe in the fold, but one little lamb was left out in the cold. Then he said: “Won’t you come? Won’t you come to Jesus? Young lambs, won’t you come?” And he held out his arms to all us young sinners there on the mourners’ bench. And the little girls cried. And some of them jumped up and went to Jesus right away. But most of us just sat there.
A great many old people came and knelt around us and prayed, old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work-gnarled hands. And the church sang a song about the lower lights are burning, some poor sinners to be saved. And the whole building rocked with prayer and song.
Rachel Held Evans finds herself stuck in the messy middle between the pro choice and pro life constituencies. She understands the arguments being made on both sides of the debate, and finds many of them persuasive. And that’s the problem. When both sides of the argument are making valid arguments there is a strong possibility that we need to broaden the terms of the discussion. I find her comments incredibly helpful and hope you do too. Rachel is speaking here for many who rarely hear our position voiced in a public forum. This quick quote will give you the gist of her argument but I encourage you to read the entire post and share your reaction.
It seems to me that Christians who are more conservative and Christians who are more liberal, Christians who are politically pro-life and Christians who are politically pro-choice, should be able to come together on this and advocate for life in a way that takes seriously the complexities involved and that honors both women and their unborn children.
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee 
Friends of Justice 