I’m writing this from the back of a second-grade classroom, where I was called in as an emergency substitute to be the legally certificated adult in the room while a student teacher oversees the class. I sit here at the … Continue reading From the Back of the Classroom
As I write this, I’m looking at the last page of the 2022 calendar that has hung over my desk all year. Put out by the Equal Justice Initiative, the calendar marks every single day with a reminder of some … Continue reading Set in Stone
A young, unmarried woman becomes pregnant. Poor and uneducated, she is sure to face censure from both her fiancé (the baby is not his) and her community (which has been known to execute adulterers). So the woman’s response to her … Continue reading Listening to Mary’s Song
This past summer, thanks to a generous grant from the Eli Lilly Foundation, my family and I had the opportunity to experience the trip of a lifetime. My pastor husband had applied for a sabbatical grant that would allow us … Continue reading Against Monoculture
In 1857, as Oregon’s White legislators crafted their State’s Constitution, they discovered that restricting the vote to White citizens only, as they intended to do, posed a tricky wordsmithing problem. The Oregon Statesman printed the transcript of the entire Constitutional … Continue reading “Who is White?” Oregon’s 1857 Constitutional Convention
Something shifted in May 2020. Suddenly, everyone was seeing racial injustice. Everyone was listening to the conversation about racial inequality. Over the course of that summer, as copies of How to Be an Antiracist and So You Want to Talk … Continue reading Sins and Diseases: Looking Back at 2020
Most of the time, the endless scroll of catastrophes on my phone or in the news produces in me only a distant sense of dread. Wars feel far away; natural disasters seem remote. I flick my finger past one heartbreaking … Continue reading The Urgency of Un-Paralyzing
The language of Christian Nationalism is the language of conquest. America is Israel, the analogy goes; the Promised Land is the North American continent. Just as ancient Israel was given a divine mandate to conquer the land of Canaan, so … Continue reading After the Exile
The only African-American member of our small church died this year. My entire family grieves his loss. When I told my ten-year-old son that Loy had passed away, my son cried out with a pang of sorrow, “But he was … Continue reading The Only Black Person in the Sanctuary
Three-Fifths 