Violence

Rose Marie Berger 10-09-2023

A rescuer reacts as he works with others to remove Palestinians from under the rubble of a house destroyed in Israeli strikes, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 9, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa 

“They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain...” —Isaiah 11:9

Rebecca Riley 11-04-2022

Grace Dove and Hilary Swank in 'Alaska Daily,' a new drama that centers the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Image: Darko Sikman/ABC

I don’t often turn on a non-news network television show and expect to learn. Instead, I expect to laugh, maybe cry (I’m looking at you, This Is Us), see loads of inaccurate depictions of medical interventions, or simply be entertained. But ABC’s new primetime drama Alaska Daily has me expanding my perspective on the possibilities of network TV. And that’s thanks to the light it’s bringing to a dark truth: the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

People react outside the Ssgt Willie de Leon Civic Center, where students had been transported from Robb Elementary School after a shooting, in Uvalde, Texas, May 24, 2022. REUTERS/Marco Bello

God, our nation feels the loss / as our children pay the cost / for the violence we accept, / for the silence we have kept.

A Russian flag flies behind a chain link and barbed wire fence. Via Alamy.

“[Sanctions] are, as we see now in the case of Russia, warfare by other means,” Jim Hodgson, a retired program coordinator for the United Church of Canada whose decades of work focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, told Sojourners.

Chris Hoke 11-19-2021

A woman, who only wanted to use her first name, Maria, from Kenosha, Wis., shows her support for Kyle Rittenhouse with a sign at the Kenosha County Courthouse during the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021. Photo by Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via Reuters.

The United States, regrettably, is still struggling to right the longstanding racial bias in our courts and policing. But one area we have entirely failed to examine is who gets labeled as a “gang” and what gets labeled as “gang activity.”

David Cortright 10-20-2021
Afghan men stand before a concrete wall topped with barbed wire and a U.S. soldier

U.S. soldiers aim at a man who tried to climb the wall at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan / Jim Huylebroek / The New York Times

“I GRADUATED FROM university in 1968. I was drafted immediately. I had not really thought much about the war, but the more I talked to the guys who were coming back from Vietnam, the more I realized that this thing was terribly wrong. I began to think of the Vietnamese forces as liberation forces trying to free their country from foreign invasion—we were the invaders.

I went through a crisis of conscience. I saw a news report about soldiers who were speaking out against the war. I thought to myself, I can do that. I began to organize among soldiers in the barracks. We submitted a petition signed by 1,300 active-duty service members that was published in The New York Times.

The basis of my commitment to activism is faith: the belief that our role in life is to serve others, to overcome suffering and injustice, especially war, which to me, is the greatest sin."

Hannah Bowman 5-03-2021

The U.S. prison system is an afront to human dignity and in sharp contrast with God's vision for justice on earth. Christians' commitment to love, hope, and justice should inspire us to work toward abolishing the prison system.

Jenna Barnett 10-29-2020

A man wearing a protective mask holds a sign outside Madison Square Garden, a polling station, on the first day of early voting in Manhattan. October 24, 2020. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

According to new polling data from PRRI, 86 percent of Americans are concerned that there will be widespread violent protests in the aftermath of the upcoming election, revealing that both Republicans and Democrats share this fear.

Kaitlin Curtice 5-27-2020

Protesters gather at the scene where George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was arrested by police officers before dying in hospital in Minneapolis. May 26, 2020. REUTERS/Eric Miller

We are so troubled.
We are the ones in denial of our violence
and we are the ones who are crying out for justice.
Can you feel us shaking?

Jim Wallis 12-12-2019

An Afghan boy stands at the site of an attack in a U.S. military air base in Bagram, north of Kabul, Afghanistan, Dec. 11, 2019. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail

An explosive report was published on Monday afternoon in the Washington Post, based on the Post’s review of thousands of pages of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, all previously unreleased until the paper recently won a multi-year court case on Freedom of Information Act grounds. And the report only gets more damning as it goes on.

Daniel José Older’s novel is a powerful meditation on love and betrayal in times of revolution.

Nancy Hightower 8-08-2019

I searched for other friends from that group. A few more had similar pictures. The reasoning for such firepower switches quickly and seamlessly between hunting and protection. My father, retreating further into radical, end times theology had given me a loaded pistol as a college graduation gift. I stayed with a friend of his after college, an older woman in her 60’s who stocked her home with so many canned goods, the place felt claustrophobic. She explained she wanted to be prepared for when the antichrist controlled the food supply. For she and my father, the war on God and country was never theoretical. The antichrist would work through legislation and technology just as much as by demonic force.

The initials of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and a placard are placed on the fence at Park Trails Elementary School, following a mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., April 9, 2018. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlin

One year after the Valentine's Day massacre inside a Florida school, students and families leading a nationwide push for gun safety will pause on Thursday for the anniversary of the deadliest U.S. high school shooting.

Many students were expected to stay home from a shortened class day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a former student with an assault gun killed 17 people on Feb. 14, 2018.

Rob Schenck 2-13-2019

Candlelight event organized by Runner's Depot to honor the 17 victims from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Coral Springs, Fla. on Feb 25th, 2018. Shutterstock / Humberto Vidal.

This week, scores of people will once again experience the grief of missing loved ones who were cut down by a deranged young man with multiple deadly weapons in the high school he shared with his victims. The Parkland, Fla. mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which killed 17 people and injured 17, joins the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which wiped out a classroom of precious children, as two of the most horrific moments in American history. The irony that the Parkland slaughter was on Valentine’s Day only increases the suffering. While many will celebrate having and enjoying their loved ones in their lives, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors will only feel afresh a terrible vacuum.

Brandi Miller 2-07-2019

Because the violence of the past was so bad, supposed lesser forms of violence seem less worthy of deconstruction. Toxic masculinity and gun violence are fruits of the same legacy. While it is much easier now to say that slavery and genocide were evils, we have failed to cut them off at their roots, the roots that reek of manipulated biblical texts, hyper masculine domination, and antiquated assumptions about gender. We cannot expect that simply acknowledging the events that resulted from toxic masculinity in the past will deconstruct the assumptions and values that created it to begin with.

Alicia T. Crosby 2-01-2019

2017 BET Awards - Los Angeles, Calif., - Jussie Smollett. REUTERS/Danny Moloshok

To claim that this attack was motivated by a singular form of bigotry is false. Such a claim is also violent and contributes to the culture that silences and erases the complicated reality of compounded oppression experienced by black LGBTQ persons every day. Hate is rarely simple and the intersectionality — or dynamic forms of subjugation individuals face because of their marginalized identities — black same-gender loving people face is at work here.

Rev. Sharon Risher 12-18-2018

Stonewall Inn vigil on behalf of the victims of the Orlando Pulse massacre. New York - MAY 13, 2016. Shutterstock. 

As a woman of faith, I urge my fellow clergy members and faith leaders to join me in standing in solidarity with the transgender community. Christianity tasks us to appeal to people’s hearts and to stand up for the most marginalized in our society. And this is why we cannot afford to remain silent on the hate that permeates American society, and the lax gun laws that help make it fatal. We must remind others that hate has no place in our society.

Mollie Davis 11-09-2018

March For Our Lives in New York. March 24, 2018. Glynnis Jones/Shutterstock.

It’s 8:20 a.m. on March 20, 2018. I’m sitting in my math class, anxiously refreshing Google, waiting for anyone to confirm what my classmates and I suspect is going on downstairs. News confirmations won’t start coming out for about another 10 minutes. We heard the sirens and knew something was wrong, but still none of us wanted to believe our worst nightmare. None of us wanted to believe a school shooting would happen to our school.

Image from Warren Wong. Unsplash. 

Whoever makes the bomb or pulls the trigger is culpable, of course. But he does not act alone. The social media trolls are as complicit in this violence as the mobs who gathered to watch the spectacle of lynchings. Fox News and Breitbart are as connected to these attacks as 19th century newspaper editors were when they ran sensational stories about black men ravaging white women to rally the Red Shirts who overthrew Reconstruction governments. Politicians who push stories that sow division today, from the White House to the County Commission, will stand in history alongside the Southern gentlemen of the 1960s who never ordered the death of a single civil rights worker but stoked the rage that ultimately erupted in the murders of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others.

As women rise to tell the truth,
their voices go unheeded.
God show us what will be:
you're building your community!