Magazine
Illustration by Hokyoung Kim
The electric fence is low,
and the coyotes many
this verdant year,
this jubilee when farmers
change their signs
from demands we
PRAY FOR RAIN
to THANK YOU LORD.
Rubyworks/Island/Columbia
HOZIER IS AN artist known for using biblical, religious, and mythological allusions to make sense of the complexity of human relationships. So, it’s appropriate that he begins Unreal Unearth, his newest and third album, at the beginning. The opening track, “De Selby (Part 1),” serves as a musical preamble that recalls one of the most striking and haunting scenes in the Bible: Genesis 1. Lyrically, Hozier takes us to the very beginning, the Spirit floating, formless, above the void. In a sort of abstract for the album, he sings of “the likes of a darkness so deep / that God, at the start, couldn’t bear.” It was a depth of aloneness so “intolerable,” Hozier explains on his YouTube channel, that God “had to create the world.”
The rest of the album is structured as an epic journey that draws on biblical wellsprings for inspiration. Hozier has spoken publicly about being inspired by Dante’s Inferno. As he journeyed through the isolation and devastation of the pandemic, Hozier saw his story reflected in the 14th-century text by the Italian poet who realized the only way out of the underworld — and into the light — is through it.
IVP
SOMETIMES, YOU HEAR someone’s story and think: You’ve been through it.
Miscarriage. The loss of siblings. The death of a parent. The murder of a nephew. Loss of identity and career direction. Racial trauma. Natasha Smith has a deeper understanding than many of what it takes to walk through seasons when, as the hymn “It Is Well With My Soul” says, “sorrows like sea billows roll.” And her book Can You Just Sit with Me? Healthy Grieving for the Losses of Life offers hope, comfort, and compassion for the people trying to hold onto an “it is well” faith.
I remember saying to someone when I was deep in the trenches of my own grief, “You mean I have to feel like this forever?” — a question Smith herself has asked. Yet each chapter of her book reminds readers that by sitting with Jesus and with others while walking through loss, the pain lessens enough to be livable. In her book, you will find promises, but not empty ones, about life after loss. It makes a difference knowing that Smith has walked through the valley of the shadow of death and — though she’d be the first to tell you she’s still passing through it — has glimpsed the other side.
Smith’s deep faith doesn’t prevent her from recommending that Christians use all healing resources at their disposal, reminding readers, “It is okay to need both Jesus and a therapist.” What sets her book apart from others, however, is that Smith, an African American woman, also speaks to the collective grief of the pandemic and the compounded trauma that Black Americans experienced — and continue to live through — in the wake of the racial reckoning of 2020.
CSA-Archive / Shutterstock
WHEN I WAS a student at Earlham College in Indiana, I co-hosted an alcohol-free dance party. Fry House, which was owned by the university, held a reputation for wild parties before we established it as Interfaith House in 1997. We — a group of religiously observant and spiritually curious undergrads — wanted to bring a new spirit into our house. I had been to enough drunken high school parties that I chose not to drink in college, other housemates had parents with alcoholism, and some abstained for religious reasons. We posted flyers, twisting a beer slogan into our hook: “Why ask why? Try Fry Dry!”
When the big night came, we pushed the furniture aside, laid out snacks, turned up the music, and swallowed our pride when only one person showed up.
This memory returned when I noticed with some surprise how Dry January, which has an app called “Try Dry,” has become a global movement. In 2013, the nonprofit Alcohol Concern (now “Alcohol Change UK”) invited people to abstain from alcohol in January; 4,000 people signed up. In 2022, 130,000 people signed up, with many more participating around the world. As alcohol-related deaths, especially among women, rose in that same period, Dry January began to take hold.
Jagjaguwar
Poured Out
Singer-songwriter Jamila Woods draws on themes of spirituality and racial justice to create music at once urgent and transcendent. In her new album, Water Made Us, she sings, “Here comes the flood, I’ll save a place for you. / And when it’s all said and done / I hope you send a dove.” Jagjaguwar
From The Mission
IN 2018, 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau journeyed to the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. He wanted to minister to the Sentinelese, the Indigenous residents of North Sentinel Island and one of the last population groups on the planet to have avoided modernization by the outside world. Chau, an Oral Roberts University graduate who grew up steeped in conservative evangelical culture, felt called to bring the gospel to unreached people.
The mission did not go as planned. Chau was quickly killed by the Sentinelese, who saw him as a threat. Chau’s death caused a public reevaluation of cross-cultural missions, one explored in the documentary The Mission. The film tells Chau’s story through his diary excerpts, his father Patrick’s account of Chau’s life, and expert interviews.
Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss don’t cast judgment; instead, they add context and ask questions. Was Chau’s death martyrdom, or the result of a foolish fantasy? Does teaching God’s word to isolated peoples help them, or open them to exploitation, colonization, and eradication?
Master1305 / Shutterstock
The school district is back to bipartisan leadership, but exclusionary policies and white supremacy have not lost their stranglehold.
Photo by Halle Parker
MANY CONSIDER LOUISIANA ground zero for the country’s most pressing environmental problems. The risks of living in a state long nicknamed “Sportsman’s Paradise” continue to mount as worsening, climate change-fueled hurricanes threaten its degrading coastlines, which slip away with rising tides. Meanwhile, an ongoing industrial boom endangers the health of residents living along the fence line of some of the major fossil fuel plants that help drive global warming. But for two quite different church communities — one deep in Louisiana’s countryside and the other in the state’s most populous city — the risks present an opportunity to model what’s needed for a resilient and faithful future.
Tucked in the rural remains of Louisiana’s plantation country, just under 500 people, most of them Black, call the small town of Convent, La., home. The 300-year-old community, situated about 50 miles west of New Orleans on I-10, moves with the bend of the winding Mississippi River, which cuts through the entirety of St. James Parish. Convent serves as the parish seat, and many of the families date back generations, descending from people who were enslaved on sugarcane and indigo plantations.
But people aren’t the only ones who reside there. Some of the wide swaths of land once used for plantations began to be sold to chemical companies in the mid-to-late 1900s. On the eastern end of Convent, a trio of industrial plants neighbor each other, spewing pollution. The coal export facility, fertilizer manufacturer, and chlorine manufacturer each silently release their own toxic mix of hazards into the air — and Convent residents like Rev. Roderick Williams breathe that air every day.
Williams believes his neighbors have suffered as a result, as cancer has spread throughout his community and others in St. James while chemical plants proliferated. It’s challenging to attribute a single cancer case to environmental pollution, but Louisiana Tumor Registry data shows that at least one census tract in St. James has a significantly higher rate of cancer than much of the state.
Williams’ hometown of Convent and the rest of St. James Parish sit in the heart of Louisiana’s chemical corridor, an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River running from Baton Rouge through New Orleans. The heavily industrialized swath — forged through the most generous property tax exemption program in the nation — has garnered the infamous nickname of “Cancer Alley” due to concerns about the health impact of the more than 200 industrial plants scattered there. A 2021 ProPublica report found that “Cancer Alley” was one of the country’s largest hotspots for toxic air.
Illustration by Leonardo Santamaria
MOST CHRISTIANS TODAY do not understand the life and teachings of Jesus as a broad vision of daring nonviolence. But scripture gives convincing evidence for this: The gospel of Luke presents Jesus as the God of peace who comes among us in total poverty into our impoverished world of war and empire, who brings with him God’s reign of peace and nonviolence, and who invites us to follow him on the path of love, compassion, and justice. With his birth, we hear the angels announce the coming of peace on earth.
Jesus, the greatest peacemaker in history, marked the path of peace toward Jerusalem, where he confronted imperial injustice and called us to learn the things that make for peace; he endured rejection, betrayal, torture, and execution in the holy spirit of nonviolence, and rose to offer his gift of peace and send us out all over again on his path of peace.
How did Jesus learn all this? Luke’s gospel offers an amazing answer. The writer presents Mary, Jesus’s holy Jewish mother, as his teacher of nonviolence.
Luke tells the story of Mary’s journey as three movements of creative nonviolence: the first, the Annunciation as a story of contemplative nonviolence, which leads to the second, the Visitation as the story of active nonviolence, which leads to the third, the Magnificat as the vision of prophetic nonviolence.
Movement 1: Contemplative nonviolence
THE ANNUNCIATION IS a scene of contemplative prayer in which Mary communes with the God of peace; in that silence and stillness, she encounters, and is ready for, God. Jesus learned this from his mother. We will see this in Jesus’s first public appearance when he sits by the Jordan River after his baptism and, in that contemplative peace, hears the God of peace call him “My beloved,” which sets him on his journey.
The first lesson of Lucan nonviolence is to sit in silence and solitude, in contemplative prayer, to open ourselves to God, to listen for God, and to be available if the God of peace chooses to speak. As Mary would have known, the first step in a peaceful life is to spend time in peace with the God of peace, to let God speak to us, to be ready if God sends us forth as peacemakers into the world of war.
THE FORMER WINDOWS depicted Robert E. Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson, Confederate generals who owned slaves, betrayed their country, and fought a war to create a new country intending to preserve and expand the enslavement of Black people across the Americas. Those windows were removed and are on loan to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. They represented a discredited yet potent historical lie perpetuated for generations and with lasting impact known as the “Lost Cause.” In the years after the Civil War, when Black Americans and others rose up in self-determination, monuments and windows like ours were conceived, paid for, and installed all over the United States. They became, and remain, a rallying cause for white supremacist movements in our day — movements that are growing.
undrey / iStock
WHEN I WAS 17, I attended a New York City business school with aspirations of becoming a rich accountant. I had it all planned out: I envisioned a corner office on Wall Street, towering high over the city with views of the Brooklyn Bridge. Each morning I was going to power-walk amid the Wall Street crowd. I never really knew what business people did for a living. My knowledge of Wall Street was limited to what I gleaned from movies and a story my father told me about my cousin the insurance broker, who “made good” for a while, but it didn’t work out for him, so he moved to Florida.
About three semesters in, I uncovered that I wasn’t wired for accounting, nor did I have the social networks that could reinforce such an endeavor. No one told me that accounting would be mostly about accounting for money that didn’t belong to me.
I had inherited a dream with little substance. I was infatuated with a vision that was like an elaborate Hollywood set. While my dream process was somewhat typical of teenage development, it nevertheless demonstrates how imaginations can be shaped by the far-reaching stories we receive. And our identities can become shaped by our service to capitalist aspirations.
xochicalco / iStock
THE POWERS AND principalities of this world don’t rest, as we were reminded this fall when ExxonMobil announced it was spending about $60 billion to buy one of the largest fracking companies on Earth (followed two weeks later by Chevron’s announced $53 billion acquisition of oil driller Hess). ExxonMobil cheerfully said that once the deal closes, its production volume in Texas’ Permian Basin would more than double to 1.3 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.
“The combined capabilities of our two companies will provide long-term value creation well in excess of what either company is capable of doing on a standalone basis,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said in a statement, which is also a reminder that the powers and principalities use language differently than the rest of us. In this case “value creation” is synonymous with “creation destruction” — those millions of barrels a day translate directly into carbon dioxide, which translates directly into fire, flood, and immiseration. They are running Genesis in reverse, but the money’s good.
joscreative / Shutterstock
POPE FRANCIS MADE history eight years ago when he became the first pope to publish an encyclical focused on the environment and our collective responsibility to end the poisoning of our planet. Unlike most such documents that stir debates largely confined to theological circles, “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home” sparked a global reaction far beyond the Catholic Church.
In October, the pope again pulled our attention back to a worsening climate crisis and even more dire threats to our common home with the release of “Laudate Deum” (“Praise God”), which comes at a time when mounting evidence of more frequent climate emergencies has been met most often with apathy, not action.
“I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” the pope writes. There are good reasons for the pope’s stark assessment. The burning of fossil fuels continues to reap obscene profits for oil executives while the impact of human-induced climate change, especially on impoverished nations, is devastating. Pope Francis laments that “the necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed.” The publication was timed for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) taking place in November and December.
I’m particularly encouraged by the pope’s support for activists and grassroots organizers who have far outpaced most political leaders when it comes to mobilizing for climate justice. Francis endorses “a multilateralism ‘from below.’” While right-wing demagogues who fancy themselves populists exploit fears of cultural displacement and economic anxiety, the pope’s hopeful populism is rooted in standing in solidarity with the poor, bringing people together across divides, and challenging structures of injustice that prop up immoral syst
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I'M TIRED OF hearing politicians use “family values” as shorthand for a narrow and often misguided agenda. It is time to broaden and reclaim a truly pro-family agenda to protect and strengthen all families. Since at least the 1990s, the political and Religious Right have often claimed a monopoly on “family values.” Many Democrats have only exacerbated this trend with their reticence to frame their policies as pro-family. As a result, whenever we hear a politician talking about “family values” or “pro-family policies,” it’s shorthand for policies that restrict women’s autonomy or threaten LGBTQ+ rights.
Of course, outside of the world of politics, it’s obvious that people with widely divergent perspectives view the welfare of their family — whether biological, blended, or chosen — as the center of their lives. Protecting families should be a nonpartisan issue with bipartisan support, not another casualty of partisan extremism.
What would a holistic pro-family policy agenda require? As Christians, we have a responsibility for both the pastoral and political welfare of families. It is these intimate, human, familial relationships that generate our common good. True family values in politics should mean programs and policies that protect human dignity, help families thrive, and promote space for kids to grow and learn. As Christians, we stand for this kind of “family values” not to force our theological beliefs on others, but to stay faithful to scripture’s commands to love God and generously provide for our neighbors’ flourishing, protecting the most vulnerable regardless of whether they share our beliefs (see Matthew 22:36-40).
Illustration by Kael Abello
A CORE PRINCIPLE of nonviolence is recognizing the humanity of your opponent. In time of war, that principle does not become irrelevant or obsolete — it becomes more difficult, and essential. In the wake of Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack, as Israel’s retributory assault was gearing up, Ali Abu Awwad, a nonviolence activist who lives in the West Bank, wrote: “Now more than ever, we all must refuse to use violence to justify more violence. We should not allow our pain to blind us to what is most needed: mutually guaranteed sovereignty, security, and dignity for both Israelis and Palestinians.”
At a time when even calling for a cease-fire is seen by some as an unforgivable choosing of sides, Awwad and other peacemakers insist that the “side” we’re called to support isn’t exclusively pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, it’s “pro-solution.” Awwad is clear that there is no military answer to that question: “The best way to support Israel,” he writes, “is to protect both Palestinian lives and Jewish lives.”
He’s not alone in recognizing the humanity of all involved. For instance, some Israelis who suffered terrible loss in the Hamas attacks have been among the strongest proponents of peace. Noy Katzman’s brother, Haim, was killed on Oct. 7. In her eulogy, Noy called for the end of the killing of innocents. “I call on the government and all of us not to use our death and pain to cause death and pain of other people or other families,” Noy said. “I demand to stop the cycle of pain, and understand that the only way is freedom and equal rights.” Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon, whose parents were killed by Hamas, implored Israel to stop its war on Gaza. “Revenge is not going to bring my parents back to life,” Inon wrote on Aljazeera.com. “It is not going to bring back other Israelis and Palestinians killed either. It is going to do the opposite. It is going to cause more casualties. It is going to bring more death. We must break the cycle.”
Awwad has also been the victim of violence. As a teenager, he was imprisoned for four years for participating in the protests of the first intifada. Years later, he was shot by an Israeli settler while changing a tire in the West Bank; soon thereafter he learned that his brother, Yusef, had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint. But Awwad did not succumb to the temptation to seek violent revenge. Instead, he began working with Israeli families who lost loved ones to violence, starting him down a path that led, in 2016, to the co-founding of a Palestinian nonviolence movement called Taghyeer, the Arabic word for “change.”
Awwad spoke with Sojourners senior editor Jim Rice while visiting Washington, D.C., last summer. After the Israel-Hamas war started, Stephen R. Stern, director of the U.S.-based Friends of Taghyeer Movement, decried the “unspeakable crimes and terror” committed against Israelis and told Sojourners, “The Israeli military response takes the Holy Land deeper” into an “uncharted abyss built on years of conflict ... on a precipice that might reach the truly unimaginable.” — The Editors
Illustration by Alex William
SOME RESPONSES TO the Israel-Hamas war seem almost clinical in their rationalization of the most abhorrent behavior, as if it’s acceptable to engage in evil acts in response to evil acts. But, as Pope Francis warned, we cannot harden our hearts and ignore the human suffering caused by the violence: “We must not become accustomed to war, to any war,” the pope wrote. “We must not allow our hearts and minds to be anaesthetized at the repetition of these extremely serious horrors against God and humankind.”
The horrors, as is the case in all war, include the victimization of children. In the first three weeks of the war, according to Save the Children, more Palestinian children were killed by Israeli bombing in Gaza than the annual number of children killed in all the world’s conflict zones since 2019, including the war in Ukraine. “The more than 3,300 deaths of Palestinian children,” Omar Suleiman wrote on Religion News Service in late October, “have come as entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, crushing innocent residents and neighbors.” The grief of the survivors echoes the lament in Matthew 2 at the slaughter of other holy innocents in the same land: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
Sharon Lavigne, founder of the Louisiana environmental justice group Rise St. James, is a 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize winner and recipient of the 2022 Laeare Medal for service to the U.S. Catholic Church and society. / Illustration by Raz Latif
WE BEGIN PLANNING each issue of the magazine months in advance, and this edition was no exception. Our conversations about Christian nonviolence last summer were rooted in our long history of wrestling with questions of how to put our biblical faith into practice in the face of challenging, real-world problems. Our goal, as always, is to offer a word that is both “timeless and timely,” and the combination of John Dear’s biblical reflection on Mary’s role as a “teacher of nonviolence” and our interview with Palestinian peacemaker Ali Abu Awwad seemed exactly that.
Illustration by Melanie Lambrick
AS A KID, I had a fraught relationship with my cat, Buddy. I know what you’re thinking: “Buddy?? What a basic name.” Well, I couldn’t agree more. I was 5 when we got him, and unfortunately, I was not trusted with the responsibility of choosing a name. To placate me, my parents told me I could come up with the middle name and the last name of the new cat (I don’t know why Buddy didn’t take on our family’s surname — “Buddy Barnett” has a nice ring to it). I christened him “Buddy Bear Donkey.”
Maybe that’s why Buddy hated me. His disdain for me was different from most cats’ aversion to small children. He didn’t run from me or hide beneath couches, both conventional and understandable responses to overzealous hugs. No, Buddy didn’t seek avoidance; he pursued revenge. The orange tabby cat sought me out when I was weakest: at 5 a.m., in my deepest slumber. He would climb on my bed, dip his deceptively cute head under the covers, and bite (not nibble!) my toes.
In the morning, I would find him so that we could make up. Hug it out. Ask him, “What had I done to deserve this?” But I couldn’t get through. I even watched The Aristocats, hoping I could learn something about Buddy. Perhaps, like the Duchess and her kittens, Buddy had a love of the piano. I played him my best rendition of “Hot Cross Buns.” (In retrospect, he might’ve been hoping for a more refined tune. Perhaps an arpeggio or some coffeehouse Norah Jones).
Illustration by Lauren Wright Pittman
“THE CONTEMPLATIVE ON her knees well knows the messy entanglement of sexual desire and desire for God,” writes theologian Sarah Coakley. If she’s right, then attending to what arouses us sensually can teach us something about how God lures us through our longing and, even, how we can attract God’s intimacy. This month, we’re exploring how queer theology can invigorate (dare I say, stimulate?) the anticipation we build throughout Advent. This approach may seem blasphemous to some who aren’t familiar with a queer-affirming lens ... and perhaps uncomfortable to some who are. Many of us are steeped in Christian body-denying theologies and moralities. We are uncomfortable meeting God in ways that are playful, erotic, unnerving, and always cognizant of power dynamics (though scripture is steeped with such sexual innuendo). Queer theology starts from (rather than argues for) not just queer affirmation, but queer celebration. It can expose the erotic dimensions of our sacred stories to reveal God’s wild and promiscuous desire for all creation.
December is a season for sending Christmas cards depicting the Holy Family — perhaps the most heteronormative image in the church year: A mom and dad stare lovingly at their beautiful baby. This static image can obscure the mess of desire, power, submission, and surprising gender fluidity required to incarnate this Holy Child. What moves in us as we ponder the design of different Christmas images that don’t shy away from this beautiful mess? What images help us face the wonder and terror of what it feels like to be undone and remade by God’s overcoming?
