This September is filled with calls to collectively remember. It was one year ago, on Sept. 10, that conservative activist and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University. September 11, of course, marks 25 years since the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York City.
Amid these invitations to remember, I have wondered what it means, in this place and moment, to remember rightly. There is no doubt we remember these events. Yet, our memories differ. As the Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion writes, “Once things have happened, there remain only words.”
A humble ploughman walks across the countryside with a radical preacher and a former nun, with thousands of livid farmers and laborers following behind them. Together, the three travelers ponder the reason for the recent pandemic that swept across the land and killed half of the people they’ve ever known.
“The sickness was [God’s] punishment for the crimes of the rich,” remarks the preacher, John Ball, rather matter-of-factly.
“So why do we suffer also?” asks the ploughman.
The late, great Wendell Berry found me at a unique time in my life: I was in the early stages of transitioning between genders.
Up until that point, part of me had always assumed that I wouldn’t connect with Berry’s writing because the people who recommended it to me were usually vaguely conservative men who wanted to live self-sufficient agrarian lifestyles. These people certainly had softer sensibilities than the more overtly militaristic conservatives I knew, but nonetheless, it sometimes felt that their idyllic worldviews and theologies didn’t have much room for people like me.
Months after protestors wouldn’t leave the lobby of the Idaho governor’s office in an attempt to meet with him over anti-transgender bills, a jury on Tuesday found a local minister guilty on a misdemeanor trespassing charge.
The jury found the Rev. Sara LaWall—who wore a clerical collar under a rainbow speckled blazer as she sat in court—guilty of trespassing after prosecutors said she remained in the governor’s office after being warned it was closed for the night during a protest of anti-trans bills this spring.
After the jury delivered the verdict, LaWall, the minister for the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, told reporters that the possible prison sentence she could face would be less time than judges can dole out for violations of Idaho’s new criminal transgender bathroom ban.
“That just feels wholly unfair and outsized and ridiculous,” LaWall told reporters after her trial. “… The jury found me guilty of staying in the governor’s office after being told to leave. I didn’t dispute those facts. But someone going to the bathroom now has a higher sentence, and that just feels so disproportionate and so wrong.”
Wendell Berry, farmer, author, and activist died earlier this week. He was 92 years old.
Berry’s death was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by a statement sent to Sojourners by The Berry Center where his daughter, Mary Berry, serves as executive director.
“The Berry Center and Berry family are heartbroken to announce the death of Wendell Erdman Berry, writer and farmer of Port Royal, Henry County, Kentucky. He passed suddenly and peacefully at home yesterday afternoon, August 31st,” the statement read. “His work continues, here and in every place where people aim to live according to nature’s measure, on and with and of their beloved home place.”
Churches are obsessed with doors. Churches bless these doors, paint them red, hold them open, photograph them, and put welcome signs on them. We tell the frightened person, the estranged child, the gay man, the addict, the doubter, the refugee, the person who has been made to feel impossible: Come in; there is a place for you here.
I believe in that sentence. But to the end of that greeting we should add: “and you can leave whenever you want.”
Try as my mother did to instill the chronology of the liturgical calendar in me, I’ve instead opted to track the passage of time by the movie release calendar. Right now, we’re in anything but Ordinary Time.
What thrills me about the fall and winter movie season is that, for the most part, the movies released in this window are the ones that will be in the conversation for the rest of the year (and even into the new year), whether it’s because they’re nominated for awards or just remain people’s personal favorites. It was around this time last year when I saw visions like Frankenstein, No Other Choice, Train Dreams, and Wake Up Dead Man. That’s not to say the movies of the summer and early months aren’t without substance or provocation (I still find myself thinking about scenes from 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Leviticus, Disclosure Day, and, of course, The Odyssey). Maybe it’s something about the liturgical motions of the season itself, the way we move from bright days to crisp nights to winter chills, that makes the films that come out during this time weightier and cozier, a cinematic hearth that burns on the fuel of new releases.
For the first time, a delegation with the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center was denied entry to Israel earlier this month.
Sabeel, a registered nonprofit based in East Jerusalem, has nearly 40 years of history in the region. In the past three years, the group has welcomed more than 450 people in delegations and pilgrimages to the Holy Land. These trips are “learning experiences” for everyone involved, said Omar Haramy, director of Sabeel. They are inspired by the Bible’s repeated instructions to “come and see,” and “go and tell,” he said.
The delegation of 13 travelers, all American citizens, was coordinated by Rev. Ed Phillips and Rev. Sara Webb Phillips, married United Methodist ministers from Atlanta, Ga. On Aug. 13, the group was entering Israel—nine delegates had been admitted into the country when border agents suddenly ordered them to re-enter the processing area, then detained the whole group in a holding room in the terminal at Sheikh Hussein Bridge.
At 28, I resigned from my dream job, packed up my life and made the 24-hour drive from Gilbert, Ariz., to Nashville, Tenn. I had wanted to work for a big Catholic ministry since high school when I went to a youth conference and saw speakers giving passionate sermons about how God changed their lives and could change mine too.
A new lawsuit hopes to win religious accommodations for millions of American workers who wish to request fossil fuel-free retirement plans from their employers.
Andrew Hartley, a Christian and statistical scientist, is suing his employer Thermo Fisher, arguing that Thermo “unlawfully forced him to compromise his religious values in order to receive the full benefits of his employment.”
Brought by the environmental action group ClientEarth, the lawsuit claims that the Supreme Court’s Groff v. DeJoy ruling in 2023 means Thermo Fisher is violating Hartley’s religious liberty by not offering a retirement plan that doesn’t invest in fossil fuels.