clothes

Céire Kealty 5-09-2022

Cartoon clothes flying into a donation box. Image credit: Panther Media GmbH / Alamy via Reuters.

Today, believers can strive to keep their priorities consistent with their dress. Before purchasing a Jesus T-shirt, wearers should consider if the garment was made under safe and fair working conditions. Believers can use their voice to pressure beloved clothing brands to respect the dignity of garment workers, through living wages and good working conditions. Believers can also wear clothes that reflect the dignity of the earth, choosing clothes from eco-conscious brands, or just by buying second-hand.

Activists perform an artistic intervention against a fast fashion retailer to raise awareness and make visible about the damage generated by the textile industry. Photo: Alejo Manuel Avila / SOPA Images/Sipa USA

Activists perform an artistic intervention against a fast fashion retailer to raise awareness and make visible about the damage generated by the textile industry. Photo: Alejo Manuel Avila / SOPA Images/Sipa USA

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about clothes — their power both to oppress people but also advance justice. If this sounds far-fetched, I invite you to reach deep into the pockets of the clothes you are currently wearing. Go ahead, try it.

Liz Lwanga 11-06-2019

Honoring the labor, expertise, and material resources used to make clothes is an essential way to honor God.

Martin L. Smith 10-29-2018

A CLOTHESLINE IS AN ODD IMAGE for Advent spirituality, but it dances before my eyes, reminding me of the pleasure I had as a child helping my grandmother hang out our clothes to dry in the back garden. How fresh they smelled when we took them down! Those who have to use dryers may never know what they are missing.

After Christmas, we will be reading from Colossians about the new styles of being human that the Incarnation attracts us to try out for ourselves. After stripping ourselves to put on the baptismal self, each layer of our new outfit is “pegged out” on the line for us to admire and try on. “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience ... Above all clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony” (3:12, 14). This same passage goes on to invite us to take seriously that meditation on scripture is a foundational Christian practice, not an optional one. Each of us must find our way of internalizing scripture, celebrating and investigating it in the inner space and landscape of our unique selves. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (3:16). Advent is a visitation to us of “words of Christ” that we need to invite in and entertain. Words of Christ as the coming Human One, our New Self, the indwelling Presence with which we are pregnant, the young Christ growing into God’s call.

Joseph Bathanti 2-11-2013

Station #10, from the Norwalk Stations of the Cross. Oil on wood panel by Gwyneth Leech (2005)

Hemorrhaging from the concertina
crown, brass knuckles, scourging, cigarette burns,
lurching the last meter of Golgotha
where He must dangle three hours in urns
of japing ether, He drops His bloody tree.
Executioners rip His clothes away,
cut cards for His keepsake convict jersey.

Martin L. Smith 11-02-2012

(andreea-cristina / Shutterstock.com)

“TAKE OFF THE garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting” (Baruch 5:1-2). We might occasionally hear in church a prayer that makes passing use of the phrase “the beauty of holiness,” but it can’t be claimed that we are helped very often to feel that the contagious goodness of God is absolutely lovely, alluring, and attractive. We are called to be beautiful human beings. Christians who are deeply serious about social justice, who carry the burden of the world’s brokenness in their hearts, who are committed to political dissent, probably need this reminder most of all. We can hardly be agents of change if our faces are disfigured by disgust and anger.

Advent may be an especially important time to listen carefully for the Word who summons us to be walking sacraments of God’s radiant beauty. Paul will speak to us about having joy in one another and clothing ourselves in love. We are meant to fill our imaginations in these weeks with the sight of Mary in the radiance of her final days of pregnancy. Doesn’t her beauty lend all the more power to her proclamation, “[God my savior] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich sent away empty” (Luke 1:52-53)?

Jennifer Wheeler 4-12-2010
The legal definition of Child Support is "periodic monetary payments by the non-custodial parent for the care of his or her minor child." In our country, non-custodial parents are usually obligat