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In the spirit of Thanksgiving, here are a few things I'm thankful for.

1. Beautiful architecture. Our church has been searching for a facility to purchase for the congregation and our non-profit organization. The two buildings we've looked at most closely have both been genuinely beautiful. Both are over one hundred years old and the craftsmanship and detail oriented for worship are inspiring. Depending on how things go with the most recent building I may have more to say about it here in the coming months.

2. Family road trips. Yesterday our family woke up early, loaded our 2012 Honda Accord, and made the nine-hour drive to West Tennessee to spend a few days with Maggie's family. It's a drive we've made many times over the past couple of decades, beginning when our family drive consisted solely of the two of us. We're a books and podcasts kind of crew when it comes to road trips, with an occasional nap tossed in for a few of us. Honestly, though, I just love the excuse to hang out with my three favorite people for a day.

3. Helen's Barbecue. Speaking of road trips, one of my favorite things to do when visiting my in-laws is to visit Helen's Bar-B-Que. Helen arrives to her small restaurant early each morning to stoke the fire. The smell of wood smoke and pulled pork, especially on an autumn afternoon, is sublime. (Wood smoke, pulled pork, and autumn foliage... I'd wear that cologne.) My in-laws picked up a few pounds and a couple of containers of sauce for last night's dinner- the perfect way to begin a few days of feasting.

4. The Brothers Karamazov. I tried to read Dostoevsky's classic a bunch of years ago but stalled. I purchased the Norton Critical Edition a year ago, hoping that the extended introduction and footnotes would provide enough context to keep me moving. Then I bumped into this series of introductory videos by Jessica Hooten Wilson which gives just enough of an explanation for each of the book's sections. I read a chapter most evenings before bed and I'm legitimately enjoying it. Anecdotally, I find that whenever the world seems especially haywire, reading an old book provides a strange sense of stability and light; that's certainly been the case with The Brothers Karamazov.

5. Readers. I continue to bump into people who've read and appreciated Rediscipling the White Church. Each time I get to talk with someone who is connecting racial justice with discipleship it's hard not to grin; what an encouragement to know that others are pursuing this essential ministry. This past week I heard from one of the first early readers of the next book. His kind words assuaged some of my insecurities and helped stoke some excitement about the chance to share it more widely. More on that project and its timeline in the next few months.

There is, of course, much more to give thanks for: my family, our congregation, dear friends... and you. Thanks for reading!

The violence exploding in Gaza and Israel continues to be unimaginably awful. In response, some of us have identified with one side over the other, however rudimentary these sides are defined. Others have taken a more universal approach, appealing to our common humanity and posting memes and photos of peace between Israelis and Palestinians which ignore generations of complexity.

Here in Chicago we are facing a different, less terrible but still difficult crisis. For a while the city has been a destination for buses full of Latin American migrants arriving from Texas and other border states. Individuals and families are arriving to an unfamiliar and ill-prepared city; many are being housed in formerly shuttered schools and active police stations.

As you might imagine, these newly arrived neighbors have provoked strong responses. Some have organized to provide clothing, food, and other needed items. Others have been quick to scapegoat the migrants, painting them as an economic or security threat. But there's another response I'm trying to learn from.

I recently spent some time with a thoughtful group of people discussing how to get white evangelical Christians to shift their thinking about certain areas of policy and legislation. This group, myself included, believes the political commitments of many white evangelicals related to our specific discussion topic have been more shaped by partisan ideology than by biblical reflection. We hope there might be away to invite this group to consider the impact of their partisanship on the larger Christian community.

During our time together, I began to notice a certain vibe expressed for the group of people whose perspectives we were interested in changing, something between embarrassment and disdain. White evangelicals, for our gathering, were assumed to be categorically distinct, their shallow theologies and predictable voting patterns evidence of a certain backwardness.

(Two caveats: First, I mentioned this observation to the friend who'd organized the gathering and he wondered if our group provided some of the participants with a safe place to vent their frustrations. Some of them, he noted, are surrounded by white evangelical culture and the opportunity to speak frankly was a gift to them. I can appreciate that. Second, by way of confession, I think the reason I noticed this condescending tendency is because I'm exceedingly susceptible to it myself.)

I'm up to my eyeballs in the new book; just a couple more chapters and the conclusion to go before I can begin reviewing the whole thing and spiral into profound insecurity about how terrible it all is. Just kidding?

Anyway, rather than risk duplicating that half-baked material here, I thought I'd point to a few things I've enjoyed recently.

First up is an excellent new book by Sarah L. Sanderson coming out next week. In The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate Sarah explores the history behind her home state's legislation which excluded African American citizens from the entire state. While I knew about Oregon's dubious designation as our country's only sundown state, Sarah's choice to explore this history through the experience of Jacob Vanderpool, the only man to have been successfully and legally been exiled from the state, introduces details which force the reader to see how this history includes us, the non-Oregonians, too.

Sarah is a wonderful writer and I appreciated her willingness to include tender aspects of her own experiences grappling with race and justice. She's provided an example that I hope lots of white Christians will follow in our own communities.

By the time W.E.B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in American, 1860-1880, he had already been writing about the years following the Civil War and their impact on African American citizens for decades. In the war's aftermath, a scholarly consensus had begun developing which claimed that the period of reconstruction had largely been a failure and that Black people had, at best, not benefited from federal protection in the South or, at worst, sabotaged those efforts.

The Harvard-educated sociologist Du Bois and one of the founders of the NAACP had written numerous rebuttals to this white supremacist historiography and Black Reconstruction was his definitive response. In it he showed in meticulous detail how the (so-called) lack of African American progress following the war was largely due to the sustained and systematic efforts by the federal and state government to re-entrench white supremacy as the rule of law.

I've been dipping into Black Reconstruction as I finish a chapter for the book I'm working on. It's Du Bois' very short introduction that I want to highlight. Here is the last paragraph.

It would be only fair to the reader to say frankly in advance that the attitude of any person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have set down. But this latter person, I am not trying to convince. I am simply pointing out these two points of view, so obvious to Americans, and then without further ado, I am assuming the truth of the first. In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.

W.E. Burghardt Du Bois

Atlanta, December, 1934

On Tuesday, as I do most Tuesdays, I spent a few hours meandering through Jackson Park. Its proximity to Lake Michigan, its savannas and lagoon, and its small meadow offer a sanctuary to many species of birds, some, like the chickadees and downy woodpeckers, which remain throughout the year and many others who migrate briefly through or decamp for the summer. On Tuesday I hung out with yellow warblers, herons, wood ducks, northern flickers, some vocal house wrens, and many others I certainly walked beneath, oblivious.

I also hung out with Wendell Berry, whose new book I've been enjoying and occasionally arguing with this summer. Berry's interest in The Need to Be Whole is on the nature of race prejudice but unsurprisingly given his lifelong exploration of agrarianism, he returns to his theme via observations about land: how Americans treat and mistreat our country and what this might say about how we (mis)treat each other.

Toward the end he imagines the university of his dreams, the University of the End of Nowhere, whose task it would be to help people once again see their places and respond to them with care. The courses, he writes, "would intend to turn American minds outward to where they are, the localities where they find themselves perhaps by chance of birth or where they have chosen to be." The focus "would be directed to looking out and looking around, to examining the relationship between habitat and inhabitant."

You'd rightly surmise that Berry understands inattentiveness to be one of the longstanding problem shared by most Americans. We don't know where we are so, if we think about it all, we misunderstand our relationships with our places and the other people and creatures they sustain.

Thanks to those of you who've contributed to my fundraising goal as I participate in the Race Against Gun Violence to benefit our church's non-profit, New Community Outreach (NCO), next month. NCO helps young people navigate trauma through restorative practices. During the school year we serve in three local high schools (over 100 students this year!). This summer we'll care for a community garden, organize a huge back-to-school fair, and run a summer leadership program for our youth. There's a lot of really great stuff happening! I'm still $750 short of my goal. If you've appreciated this newsletter, would you consider making a donation? Thanks!

Last week, we inaugurated our new mayor. The Chicago mayoral race came down to a choice between Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and the eventual winner, and Paul Vallas, a career politician and the police union-endorsed candidate. One of the narratives throughout the race was that Chicago needed a mayor who would take crime seriously. The head of the police union predicted that, should Johnson win, 800-1,000 police officers would resign and there would be “blood in the streets.” For what it’s worth, a few days after the inauguration, neither of his predictions have come to pass.

The president of the police union is notoriously incendiary so, as despicable as they were, his comments weren’t surprising to Chicagoans. What was interesting to notice during the campaign was how many pundits and ordinary people outside of the city picked up on this narrative about crime and law enforcement: that Chicago is uniquely dangerous among American cities (we’re not) and that increased numbers of police would solve the problem of crime. I noticed that quite a few people who live far from Chicago seemed to have strong opinions about our rates of crime and its seemingly straight-forward solution.

My friends Adam and José have written a wonderful book, Ecosystems of Jubilee, that was released last week. I'm thrilled to share the following excerpt with you and hope you'll consider picking up a copy.

Jesus’s invitation was not for the rich man to throw away his riches but to gift them to people impacted by poverty. He was to open his hands in a sacrificial way and enter God’s economy—a place where the gift would continue to circulate for the blessing of the ecosystem. Entering into God’s subversive gift economy is transgressive, as money and resources will bypass the traditional channels to meet the needs. Jubilee also initiates a gift-giving economy in which the rich are no longer separated from people impacted by poverty; the nature of the exchange being the gift of mutuality that comes from being the beloved community.

Here's a lightly edited version of my Good Friday sermon from last night's Seven Last Words service. I hope your Holy Week has been blessed and that you can worship the resurrected Christ in worship tomorrow.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

In their quest for imperial power, the ancient Romans used terrorizing tactics to subdue the people they conquered. Specifically, they perfected the slow and terrible death by crucifixion. Much like the lynching tree in our own recent history, when it came to death by crucifixion, public cruelty was the point.

Yet despite how often they employed it, the Romans found crucifixion a distasteful thing about which to speak. Death on a cross was reserved for outlaws, rebels, and the enslaved. To a people who valued strength, wealth, and domination, those who were sentenced to this gruesome death were not worth commemorating. The crucified, then, occupied a strange place: on the one hand, their bodies became spectacles, broadcasting the empire’s violent warning far and wide; on the other, their names were deemed too worthless to utter, much less remember. The crucified were thoroughly, intentionally, and purposefully forsaken.

Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released it's latest report. In their press release, they wrote,

In 2018, IPCC highlighted the unprecedented scale of the challenge required to keep warming to 1.5°C. Five years later, that challenge has become even greater due to a continued increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change.

Then, a paragraph later, the IPCC goes on to describe some of the implications of our collective failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards. More intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall and other weather extremes further increase risks for human health and ecosystems. In every region, people are dying from extreme heat. Climate-driven food and water insecurity is expected to increase with increased warming. When the risks combine with other adverse events, such as pandemics or conflicts, they become even more difficult to manage.

Last weekend I co-facilitated another Sankofa trip. One stop that is always meaningful to the trip's participants is the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. This bridge was the site of the infamous Bloody Sunday, when African American marchers were chased down and beaten by law enforcement officers as they attempted to take their demand for voting rights to the state capitol in 1965.

After walking across the bridge, imagining the courage and determination of those first marchers, we typically spend a few minutes talking about the man for whom the bridge is named. Pettus was a self-avowed white supremacist, a Confederate soldier who led the regional Ku Klux Klan before using those networks to get elected to the U.S. Senate where he tirelessly opposed reconstruction.

Pettus died thirty-one years before the bridge bearing his name was built. Which is to say, those naming the bridge meant to communicate something to those who would use it, something about power and control. All these years later, despite the bridge's significance to the Civil Rights Movement, despite Selma being 84% African American today, the bridge continues to broadcast the racist's name.

Earlier this week I read a critique of critical race theory (CRT) which provoked a couple of observations which I posted to social media.

Today I read a critique of critical race theory by a white Christian theologian. The article was relatively nuanced and I'm not especially interested in defending CRT, but he did two things that felt really familiar that I want to note.

First, while adequately summarizing what CRT is (from my layperson's perspective), he showed no interest in why CRT emerged as an explanation for USA racism. The author was content to deal in the realm of pure ideas; the lived experiences behind those ideas entirely escaped his curiosity. This seems like a regular move made by white critics of Black thought (theory, theology, etc.). Why?

My hunch is that because white culture is dominant and normative, white critics have been handed the privilege of thinking/critiquing/theologizing in a de-contextualized manner. We've not had to be aware of our own social locations and how these have shaped us, so we ignore these forming realities for others as well.

Second, when offering his criticism, the author didn't engage at all with any of the African American theological tradition(s). This despite the fact that the CRT representative he engaged with was himself a (Black) Christian whose faith informed his theoretical reflections.

This happens all the time! White Christians will take contributions made by Black people (authors, theologians, academics, etc.) and critically run their ideas through a white frame. This despite the fact that the traditions, theories, theologies, etc. informing the Black person are available for anyone to engage with. But most of the time this source material gets dumped at the feet of whatever the white gatekeepers have agreed is the neutral standard.

I doubt these tendencies - lack of curiosity and ignorance of other frameworks - are usually malicious. But they do indicate a pretty thick bubble, a sort of captivity to cultural homogeneity.

These sorts of things are understandable in secular cultures, predictable results of the pursuit and consolidation of power. But, given who we're meant to be, it's frustrating to see them expressed so unreflectivity in the church.

Over on Instagram, someone responded to these observations with this thoughtful reflection.

Unlike the recent flights of thousands of other holiday travelers, the commuter jet that took me from Chicago to Memphis on Christmas afternoon was on time. In fact, we arrived early enough that I could slowly stroll through the relatively quiet terminal. Maggie and the boys had driven down a few days earlier - a day sooner than we'd planned so as to beat the incoming snow storm - and she was making the hour drive from her parent's house to pick me up.

As I waited for my patient wife who, after all these years, knows to anticipate a pastor's holiday responsibilities, a display of large black and white photos on the departure level near the ticket counters caught my eye. Stenciled to the wall was the display's title, "Martin's Last Flight." Beneath it, attached to the wall, was one of the metal historical signs so common throughout the South. This one commemorated the chartered American Airlines flight which flew Dr. King's body back to Memphis after he was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

I've visited the National Civil Rights Museum which now occupies the Lorraine Motel more times than I can remember. I've looked up at the balcony and imagined the terrible scene. I knew that Dr. King was eulogized at Ebenezer Baptist Church and Morehouse College in Atlanta before being buried nearby. But I hadn't thought much about the in-between from Memphis to Atlanta.

The photos surrounding the sign began filling in that gap: the jet idling on the tarmac, King's closest associates lifting their friend aboard his final flight. And this detail about the previous day's flight to Memphis: "Prior to leaving Atlanta, airline officials halted King's flight because of a bomb threat." My eyes lingered over the sentence and I've thought about it repeatedly since.

Last week was full of travel. First, I flew to Dallas to attend the Mosaix Conference, an every-three-year gathering focused on the multiethnic church. I've attended many of these conferences over the years and am always impressed how the organizers, led by Pastor Mark DeYmaz, manage to include so many different practitioners, academics, and other proponents of multiethnic ministry.

If there was one theme which raised to the surface for me at this year's event, it was the role of BIPOC leaders in the multiethnic movement. While not a new theme, it was emphasized by many of the speakers from the main stage. The one workshop I was able to attend was led by Dr. Oneya Okuwobi, professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Okuwobi's research focuses on the impact of multiethnic churches (often white-led) on leaders and staff of color. It's not a pretty picture!

Dr. Okuwobi detailed the cost extracted from most of the leaders of color whom she interviewed. Having to navigate church cultures which value them mostly for their representation rather than for the experiences and expertise they bring is exhausting. It is demoralizing coming to realize that what these churches said about their goals for justice and reconciliation are nowhere near their intentions.

Someone in the workshop asked about whether the business world was any more hospitable to leaders of color than are majority white and some multiethnic churches. Dr. Okuwobi chuckled and said, No, they are just as bad. The important difference, she pointed out, is that most people aren't expecting their workplaces to behave as healthy communities. Our churches, on the other hand, often portray themselves as life-giving families which increases our capacity to seriously wound those who've taken us at our word.

"Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth." (Matthew 5:5) In a chapter about "The Bible and Land Colonization" in Theologies of the Land: Contested Land, Spatial Justice, and Identity, Mitri Raheb points out that Jesus is here referencing Psalm 37 which repeatedly references not "the earth" but, importantly, "the land." Reflecting on this, Raheb, a Palestinian Christian and president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, writes that this beatitude would be better translated, "Blessed are the meek; they will inherit the land." The land referenced by the psalmist and, presumably, by Jesus wasn't an abstraction but a specific place, Palestine.

Does this make Jesus' difficult teaching any more compressible? Initially, no.

Listening to the words of Jesus, through Palestinian, Native North American, Black South African, or Aboriginal Australian ears, therefore, does not offer much help; it does not make more sense of Jesus' words. He must have been mistaken! It is all too obvious that the military occupation controls the land, and that it controls the land's resources. Everything is controlled by the empire. The empire inherits the land, not the meek. Jesus was mistaken because the meek are crushed.

A few weeks ago I signed a contract with InterVarsity Press to write the book I've been thinking about for the past decade, tentatively titled Communities of Caretakers. Like many others, when I first read Willie Jennings' book, The Christian Imagination, I found a world of hopeful and creative questions opening up. I could cite any number of paradigm-shifting passages, but this one, from the first chapter, is exemplary.

People today continue to live in a dual trajectory of constantly shifting geographic spaces made more mutable by the dictates of capitalistic logic and racial identities that are free-floating and changeable, yet constantly stabilized through the reciprocity of racial being... without land functioning as identity signifier, racial designations historically understood and politically activated continue to be compelling sensible ground on which to envision collective agency. Until one begins to reflect on the interconnected turnings of space and the formation of racial being as mirrored process, every attempt to destabilize racial identity, argue for a common humanity, and claim race as fiction, social construction, or essentialized nonsense will be superficial at best.

It was Jennings' insistence that we cannot understand the history and impact of race as a system without grappling with Creation - land, earth, place, geography, etc. - which captured my imagination. As he notes in this paragraph, any attempt to address the harm of race without reclaiming our creaturely interdependence on the rest of Creation is bound to fall flat. Such attempts have already conceded the exploitative logic of race.

So, why has it taken me ten years to begin writing this book? I'd actually pitched this idea to IVP back in 2015 and they had graciously asked to see a proposal. But then the 2016 election happened and I got very interested in why the discipleship practices of so many white churches were forming Christians who were content with racial segregation and injustice. So I set this project aside for the past five years. But more honestly, the reason it's taken me so long to begin writing this book is because I've been aware of how much I don't know about the intersection of Creation and race. For years now I've been reading, studying, and talking with people far wiser than myself who are helping me to see connections and relationships I'd previously only been able to guess at. And while there's still so much to learn and a lot I'm still learning to see, I do feel as though I finally have enough of a platform from which to begin.

In the final chapter of Rediscipling the White Church, "Practicing Uncommon Friendships," I explain why a relational reconciliation paradigm is a hindrance to racial justice.

If [white people] are concerned at all about race, we have tended to think about the problem of racial injustice and segregation as one of relational separation, of different racial and ethnic groups being distanced from one another such that the unity of the church is compromised. From this perspective, the obvious solution is to bridge the separation and bring formerly divided people together. Multiethnic and multiracial churches are the evidence of success in this version of racial reconciliation.

This model of reconciliation prioritizes the comfort of white people over the well-being of people of color. By elevating reconciled relationships, white people are not asked to grapple with the nature and impact of our own whiteness. We don't have to think about the way race, as a way of identifying and categorizing people, was intentionally constructed over time as a means to benefit some while exploiting others. Neither do we have to acknowledge the material realities of racial injustice and segregation. If cross-racial relationships are the goal, then as long as I can point to a couple of friends of color, I don't have to notice how race makes the lived realities of those same friends far more difficult than my own.

What I advocate for in that book is an approach which prioritizes "racial justice over relational togetherness" and which accounts "for the particularities of whiteness." As common sense as such an approach will sound to some, for many white people - and white Christians especially - the choice to not begin with relationships cuts against some of our deeply held instincts. As Emerson and Smith identify in Divided By Faith, these include individualism, relationalism, and anti-structuralism. De-prioritizing individual relationships has been one of the themes I return to regularly, especially when talking with white Christians who want to participate in the work and ministry of racial justice. You can imagine my surprise, then, when a justice leader I deeply respect talked with me and a friends about the importance of relationships when it comes to reconciliation and justice. Here's what happened.

The author of a book I recently finished grew up on a Midwestern farm. He wrote lovingly of his father, a man whose difficult work didn't keep him from maintaining a steady rhythm of effort and rest. His was an unhurried pace until, the author remembers, the wheat was ready for harvest. Then the pace changed; the hours of labor were long and the window for a good harvest was short. It was only after the fields had been cleared and the grain shipped that the farmer could rest. Ahead of him laid late autumn and winter when the hours of daylight were fewer and the seasons themselves invited his rest.

Here in the northern hemisphere we are making the turn toward fall. Though the autumnal equinox is still a few weeks away, already the quality of light has shifted. The native grasses and wildflowers are at their peak; some tower over my head during my sabbath walks through Jackson Park. There are the beginnings of yellows and reds in the canopy of trees which tunnel our street and those leaves which are still green look tired- wilted, cracked, and browning around the edges. Our days have been hot this week but, unlike the earlier summer months, the nights have cooled pleasantly.

I didn't grow up in places with four noticeably distinct seasons. My childhood was spent near the equator: in Venezuela it was hot and dry or hot and rainy and in Ecuador, from Quito's almost 10,000 feet above sea level, it was either mild and clear or mild and cloudy. High school was spent in southern California where the foothills turned green in the winter and the skies were less smoggy but that was about the extent of the seasonal change. It wasn't until I went away to college in western North Carolina in a small cove tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains that I finally experienced the four seasons, one sliding slowly into the next. The mountains blazed in the fall, the creeks held ice along their banks in wintertime, and red buds and rhododendron let us know that spring had arrived. It was a revelation.

Here are two anecdotes to illustrate what's been on my mind this week. First, earlier this week I was on a video call with a church from the east cost discussing some of the themes from Rediscipling the White Church. Toward the end one of the participants asked something like, "What brings you joy in this work?" In almost each of the book discussions I've been a part of, and in justice conversations more broadly, some version of this question is raised. What keeps you going? Where do you find hope? How do you respond to the backlash? The questions, as I understand them, aren't really about me; they reflect the questioner's intuition about the cost of racial justice.

Second, over the twelve years since we started our church, there have been innumerable guests who've visited once or twice before moving on. The reasons they didn't stick around are countless and plenty of them are good. But we've been around long enough now that I've had the opportunity to hear some of the reasons that some of the guests decided not to stay. As a representative example, one man told the person who invited him something along the lines of, "Your church is really doing it," before adding something like, "I'm just not sure it's for me." This man, who was theoretically looking for a diverse congregation engaged in the ministry of racial justice, realized the cost might be higher than he wanted to pay.

Earlier this summer I joined about 60 other Chicago-area faith leaders for a die-in at a gun shop a few miles outside city limits. We were compelled to gather on that hot summer day and lay ourselves down in front of the store which supplies a disproportionate amount of the firearms used in the crimes committed in our city for the sake of the truth. You see, after the mass shooting at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that state's governor and other influential people used Chicago's gun violence as an excuse not to advocate for federal gun legislation. "There are, quote, 'real' gun laws in Chicago," said the governor after the massacre. "I hate to say this, but there are more people who are shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas, and we need to realize that people who think that, 'Well, maybe if we just implement tougher gun laws, it's going to solve it,' Chicago and LA and New York disprove that thesis."

Governor Abbott is far from the first to use Chicago as a scapegoat for his responsibilities. Our city does not suffer the nation's highest rates of gun crimes but our reputation supersedes the facts and makes us a convenient target. When pundits and politicians seize on this fiction in their attempts to subvert legislation like an assault weapons ban which is proven to reduce violence, they are engaging in blatant deception. While it's true that our city has relatively strong gun laws, those laws only extend to the city's borders. The same can be said about county and state legislation. To circumvent these laws, one only needs to leave the city, county, or state limits, an easy thing considering how close we are to Indiana, a state which no longer requires residents to "obtain or possess a license or permit to carry a handgun."

Chicago has neither a magical moat or a force field keeping out the guns which can be legally obtained just a few minutes away. And this brings us to the clergy protest in front of Chuck's Gun shop, a store linked by the Chicago Police Department to the highest number of shootings in the city. Its proximity to city limits as well as its proven connection to gun violence made it an ideal location to call out the governor's lie. The city's gun legislation has no impact on the death dealing which happens just beyond our borders and to use our suffering as a rationale for inaction is both cynical and cowardly. In an op-ed for Christianity Today, my friend, Pastor Charlie Dates, points out that it's also racist.

This week I got to speak at a conference focused on justice hosted by Progressive Baptist Church here in Chicago. Here is a lightly edited version of what I shared.

On a November Sunday in 1898, the Rev. Francis J. Grimke stood before his congregation at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington D. C. Rev. Grimke had been born into slavery in South Carolina, the son of a white enslaver and an enslaved mother of African descent. How he traveled from bondage on a plantation to self-emancipating himself to studying in freedmen’s schools to attending Princeton Seminary to leading one of the capitol’s most well-known Black congregations is a fascinating story for another day.

As Grimke made his way to the pulpit that autumn day, the Civil War had been over for 30 years. More pressing for Grimke and his church was the fact that the federal government’s southern reconstruction efforts had been halted a mere 12 years after the war’s end and the grotesque impacts of that cowardly decision were everywhere to be seen, particularly in the white supremacist terror which manifested in lynching. Over four thousand of these deadly acts of white power have been documented from Reconstruction through 1950.

On this Sunday, standing before his people, Grimke was thinking about countless white people who enabled and oftentimes led the mobocracy terrorizing Black people. He was also thinking about their pastors.

Last week, following the terrible massacre in Uvalde, Texas Governor Greg Abbott used Chicago as an example of why stricter gun laws wouldn't have prevented the deaths of 19 students and two of their teachers. Quoted in a CNN article, the governor said,

"I hate to say this, but there are more people shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas. And we need to realize that people who think that, well maybe if we just implement tougher gun laws, it's gonna solve it," Abbott said. "Chicago and LA and New York disprove that thesis. And so, if you're looking for a real solution, Chicago teaches that what you're talking about is not a real solution. Our job is to come up with real solutions that we can implement."

President Trump claimed something similar. "If you look at the city with the strongest gun laws in our nation, it’s Chicago,” he said. “And Chicago is a disaster. It’s a total disaster."

Driving to the church office earlier this week, I listened to the latest report from Uvalde, Texas. The reporter was interviewing residents of that heartbroken city about what they want done to prevent yet another massacre of the innocents. The opinions varied strongly, as they do these days, but I've not forgotten what two teenage boys said. Through my car speakers they sounded like recent high school graduates and their replies to the reporter's questions squared perfectly with the conservative postmortem talking points to which we've all become accustomed. Gun control wouldn't help, they said, because the real problem is the person behind the gun who would surely find some other way to wreak carnage without easy access to a firearm.

It wasn't what they said, though, that I noticed. That was predictable. It was how they said it. There was no anger in their voices. No combativeness. What I heard was deep and sad resignation to the culture of death in which both of these young men have been raised. They've never not known a country where young men with rifles routinely shoot up rooms full of children. It wasn't ideology which animated their words; it sounded like despair.

You can hear something similar trembling beneath Elizabeth Bruenig's article for The Atlantic this week.

Marcus Briggs-Cloud is a linguist and the co-director of Ekvn-Yefolecv, "an Indigenous ecovillage community in Weogufka, Alabama comprised of Maskoke persons who have returned to their ancestral homelands to practice linguistic, cultural, and ecological sustainability." Years ago he resolved to revitalize the language of his people before it completely died out. The Maskoke people depend on communal ceremonies which renew their relationship to the world, ceremonies which depend on the specific vocabulary embedded in their language. As Briggs-Clouds notes, "No language means no ceremony; no ceremony means Maskoke People will perish." You can understand why saving a language projected to disappear by 2040 felt so urgent.

But in his attempt to save Maskoke language, Briggs-Cloud ran into a problem. Surrounded by the norms and assumptions of Western culture, Maskoke people continually had to reach for English words to describe concepts and situations that had no precedent in their own culture. And by importing English words to adequately describe the impact of Western culutre, Briggs-Cloud and his people "would find our Indigenous ontological worldview, that is inextricably tied to the natural world, flipped upside-down." The linguist was faced with a dilemma: admit the inevitable demise of his people's language and culture or embark down a more radical path. He chose the latter.

The result of Briggs-Cloud's refusal to surrender his language and culture is Ekvn-Yefolecv. In addition to being a haven for the Maskoke language, the ecovillage is a model of sustainability, environmentally friendly farming practices, and decolonized curriculum for their children. The members of Ekvn-Yefolecv understand that they are not "exempt from globalization or climate crisis" but this community is allowing their language and culture to flourish. Their commitments, radical from a certain vantage point, were the common sense steps necessary to ensure their survival.

Next month I'm running the Race Against Gun Violence in support of New Community Outreach, our church's nonprofit organization which engages young people in the work of restorative justice. If you've appreciated these newsletters, would you help me reach my fundraising goal? Thanks!

This rare mid-week edition of the newsletter is not about Tim Keller; it's about the weird conclusions white Christians make when we ignore the experiences of Christians of color. But to get there, we'll need to begin with the well-known pastor from Manhattan. Also, the man in this photo is Rev. Fred Shuttleworth, a man who once said he would either "kill segregation or be killed by it," standing in front of his house after it was bombed by the KKK. More about him in a minute.

The following is a sermon I preached last Sunday about Jesus' invitation to live peaceably with God's creation. And please don't miss the invitation below the sermon to a live webinar with some friends coming up next month!

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

34 “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today. (Mt. 6:25-34)

In Marilynne Robinson's novel, Gilead, an elderly clergyman writes to his much younger son, "This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it." I was reminded of these two short sentences yesterday, on Earth Day. As mentioned in a recent newsletter, I've been rereading Pope Francis' encyclical letter, Laudato Si' over the past few months. One of the themes he returns to is how our contemporary lifestyle, particularly for those of us in the industrialized West, detaches us from the rhythm of creation. "Human beings and material objects," writes Francis, "no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational." This antagonist stance, aided by what the pope calls our "technocratic paradigm" distances us from nature; it works against our attentiveness.

When we think about attending to creation, we are likely to first consider the plants and animals with whom we share our communities. Driving through Chicago congestion this week, I was startled to watch a squirrel treat an electrical line as a convenient overpass. Last year I watched a coyote explore the park across the street from our church office. Depending on where you live, your experiences with nature might be a bit more... natural.

Of course, we are a part of nature too. We belong, in Francis' words, to the "universal communion" through which we "are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family." If there is only one Creator, than we must take our place among the rest of God's creatures. And the same forces which work against us seeing the plants and animals around us also warp how we see one another. What Francis writes about the manipulative power of the technocratic paradigm is true for how it is applied against human and non-human creation. He writes that this "paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object."

Today I'm featuring an excerpt from Amy Julia Becker's new book, To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope. I got to read a early version of To Be Made Well and was intrigued by what she's doing in this book and I think you'll be too. I'm talking with Amy Julia about the book on Monday. See the details below about how you can join us for that conversation.

The Barrier of Status

Excerpt from Chapter 9 of To Be Made Well.

Is watching, scrolling, and sharing the best we can do in response to yet another televised war?

I want the act of watching a war unfold on the other side of the world to feel stranger than it does. It should feel stranger than it does. But I was thirteen when the first Gulf War was beamed into our home, a graduate student when our president sent troops into Afghanistan. I drove to Radio Shack to pick up an antenna so I could watch the beginning of the second invasion of Iraq, an event that, in my memory, seemed more like the beginning of a race than the bloodletting it eventually was.

Televised and streaming war is normal now. Some of these conflicts get better ratings than others; the horrors in Ukraine have captivated us in a way that Syria or Yemen or Ethiopia never quite managed.

A sermon about the truth which abides, even in our cynical age.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32) 

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him. (John 18:38)

Thinking with James Cone about the fickle nature of white compassion and about a deeper and stronger alternative.

In an article published twenty-two years ago, theologian James Cone reflected on the often ignored relationship between white supremacy and the "exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature." Why has the connection between environmental destruction and racism been overlooked? Towards the end of the article Cone offers one suggestion. He writes, "To be sure, a few concerned white theologians have written about their opposition to white racism but not because race critique was essential to their theological identity. It is usually just a gesture of support for people of color when solidarity across differences is in vogue. As soon as it is not longer socially and intellectually acceptable to talk about race, white theologians revert back to their silence."

While Cone's insight about environmental racism are worth reflection, I want to draw our attention to his critique about the shallowness of much white anti-racist solidarity. Cone differentiates between being generally supportive of solidarity and understanding such solidarity as essential to one's theological identity. His focus is on theologians but I think the lesson can be applied more broadly to include each of us.

Can we give white people the space to grieve? Should we?

On Friday I got to facilitate a conversation between six ministry colleagues from around the country for our denomination's annual pastors conference. These women and men serve in very different contexts and they represent much of the cultural and racial diversity in our movement. Our hope was to model a conversation between pastors who are deeply invested in the particularities of their communities with a posture of humility and curiosity. We wanted to wonder out loud whether that same posture might allow our clergy to move toward one another during this contentious time of polarization. It was, for me at least, a refreshing and hopeful conversation; you can watch the entire thing here if you're interested.

There was a particular moment in our panel conversation that I'll be reflecting on for a while. Pastor Peter Ahn, a friend and pastor from New Jersey, reflecting on how our denomination has shifted from overwhelmingly white to unmistakably multi-ethnic, wondered what this cultural change might feel like to white clergy. In essence, he asked whether we have collectively given white people the necessary space to grieve the loss of how the denomination used to look and feel. (You can watch Pastor Ahn's reflection as well as the responses by two white colleagues beginning at 57:19.)

A call for the church to respond courageously to insurrection and idolatry.

In the days following the January 6 insurrection, a lot of us tried to make sense of the violence and chaos we watched unfold on live TV from the US Capitol. For as unpredictable as were the days following the election, the scenes of an enraged mob attacking police officers, chanting for the Vice President's death, and waving symbols of national and religious allegiance defied even the most pessimistic expectations. In the months since, we've learned more about the motivations which drove the seditionists and which animate ongoing attempts to disenfranchise voters around the country. And, if we're paying attention, Christians - and pastors who lead white Christians especially - ought to be rattled by what we're figuring out.

So, who participated in or supported last year's insurrection? In a thoroughly researched article for The Atlantic Barton Gellman investigates a number of possible motivating factors. But only "one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state." Additional research drew out another disturbing nuance. "Respondents who believed in the Great Replacement theory, regardless of their views on anything else, were nearly four times as likely as those who did not to support the violent removal of the president." This theory, popular in the right wing media, states that the day is rapidly approaching when white people will not only no longer represent an overall majority in the country, but “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”

Making it through a long year with the help of some good books.

How long is a year? A few days ago our oldest son counted off the few remaining days until the beginning of a new year and that remaining time seemed both impossibly short and interminably long. We sat around the dinner table that same evening wondering about whether our boys might begin the semester online rather than returning to their classrooms. Should our church take a break from in-person worship for a couple of Sundays, returning to the less-than-ideal days of virtual church? This year has seemed very long.

This summer, just before the boys made their return to school after the long disruption, I picked up two books which had been written during the pandemic. Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie both take some aspects of our shared sorrow as their backgrounds. For Adichie the pain is especially pronounced; her beloved father died at a moment of global lock-down. Her searing and specific reflections of those days were a reminder of how these pandemic days have left their mark on each of us, even if the impact is not proportionately felt. Mostly these authors left me in awe that from the eye of the storm they were already making some kind of tentative meaning of it.

On rejecting the radical life for one of harmony.

In Richard Powers' beautiful novel The Overstory we are introduced to a group of very different people whose lives are magnetically and mysteriously pulled together in the service of vulnerable forests. After the spectacular loss of a particularly magnificent stand of old growth to a logging corporation, the group turns to more extreme measures to protest the destruction of so many trees. During a break from their illicit work, one man, Adam, reflects on the potential consequences of their tactics. "Destroying federal property. Serious stuff." Others in the group chime in to agree about the gravity of the path they've taken but one woman, the youngest and the moral center of their little community, is silent. "Maidenhair is far away, in another country. At last she says, 'This isn't radical. I've seen radical.' Then Adam sees it again, too. A living, breathing mountainside, stripped bare."

The others in her group had come to believe that their desperate times called for increasingly radical measures. Only Maidenhair could see that they weren't the true radicals. Their acts of protest and resistance, however outside the mainstream, were the very definition of sanity when compared with the wholesale destruction of trees which easily predated this nation's origins.

We need good pastors who will show us the way to the abundant, non-utilitarian way of life.

Once or twice each year our family makes the eight-hour drive from Chicago to visit grandparents and cousins in west Tennessee. When describing the route to someone who has never driven it, I tell them that it's hundreds of flat, straight miles surrounded by fields of corn, soybeans, and, during the short stretch through Missouri into Tennessee, cotton. I don't quite say it, but my meaning is obvious: it's a predictable drive, boring even. There are no ranges of mountains in the distance, no vistas or overlooks. The two Mississippi River crossings, climbing up unadorned steel bridges before crossing a state line and descending to the other side, might represent the most elevation change of the entire trip.

A climate scientist prepares us for hard conversations about racial justice... just in time for those awkward holiday gatherings.

The best book about racial justice I've read this year isn't about racial justice at all; it's about climate change. More precisely, Saving Us is about how to talk about climate change with people who aren't all that interested in talking about climate change.

Some of us are looking forward to visiting family and friends next week, maybe for the first time in a long time. As is often the case when people who don't regularly see each other gather around a table piled high with food and drink, it's likely that some interesting conversations may present themselves. In fact, one of the requests I most often hear made of white people by our friends of color is that we would show up to these tables ready for challenging conversations. After all, it's one thing to speak up for racial justice when surrounded by like-minded friends but the real test of our solidarity shows up around Thanksgiving tables and Christmas trees.

It's officially fall here in Chicago. I know this because a couple of days ago I roasted and blended a bunch of pumpkins for pies and soups - pumpkin and apple soup is one of our autumn-winter favorites, something like this if you've never tried it - and our church is getting together for s'mores and a campfire on the lake shore tomorrow evening. Such a great time of year!

Yesterday afternoon I was talking with a couple of friends who both serve churches in small Midwestern towns. They are thoughtful and humble leaders in their communities and I learn something every time we catch up. This conversation turned to divisions- the ones within congregations and the larger cultural ones which isolate Christians from one another. I can't say we figured anything out - we're working on it! - but I found myself encouraged just to hear other clergy, in contexts quite different from my own, wondering about similar difficult things.

These days it's rare to go very long without hearing about divisions. They come in some predictable flavors: political, regional, cultural, and so one. Some of us have experienced these divides in our own families; we've been pushed apart by ugly partisanship. For my part, not surprisingly, I'm interested in how racism and white supremacy have long divided American Christians.

As I listen to these conversations and commentaries, I've come to think that there are different types of divisions. They are not all cut from the same cloth. When we lump them together though, we end up engaging these distinct forms with the same tools. This isn't a comprehensive list, but here are the three types of divisions I've observed along with the different tools we might consider engaging them with.

Today I'm wrestling with a tension common to racial justice work: it is possible to tell the truth to white people? But first.. Next week I'll run the Race Against Gun Violence here in Chicago. Last weekend sixty people were shot in our city, seven fatally. It's heartbreaking and makes the work we're doing through New Community Outreach to address trauma all too necessary. This school year we're expanding from one high school to three in our community. If you've appreciated these free newsletters, would you please consider a donation to help us reach our $25,000 goal? Thanks!

I finished reading a new book about trees on a day this week when the news around the world was once again overwhelming and terrible. In Afghanistan people were trying to escape with a desperation I can barely imagine much less, if I’m honest, consider for more than a few minutes at a time. Then it got worse: a suicide bomber. And here I was reading about trees.

Over the course of the summer, as our congregation has been able to gather together again, I’ve been listening to how we’re talking about the true and terrible reports being dispatched from all corners. It seems we have all been overpowered by the consistency of upheaval and heartbreak. There have been wildfires and earthquakes, a high-rise collapse, an insurrection to begin the year. Our emotions slide to despair as our attention lurches from one breaking tragedy to the next.

This week's newsletter features an excerpt from my friend Dominique Gilliard's new book. But first...

Earlier this summer I got to spend some time in NYC with good friends and last week our family camped at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. I hope you've had some moments of refreshment and retreat this summer. These are chaotic days and it's important that we're pacing ourselves for the long haul!

Next month I'm running the Race Against Gun Violence here in Chicago to raise money for New Community Outreach, an organization I help lead. This summer NCO ran a leadership development program for youth, hosted a large back-to-school fair, and tends a community garden which provides fresh produce for our neighbors each Saturday.

If you've found this newsletter helpful, would you please consider a donation to this fundraiser? Thanks!

There is a strange warning being passed around these days and I expect, with Independence Day coming up, its urgency will be heightened. It comes in different shades, but essentially we are being alerted to a frightening new development which seeks to retell this country’s origin story. If you have even a passing awareness of the back-and-forth about, for example, Critical Race Theory or The 1619 Project produced by the you know what I’m referring to. It’s not that most of the critics of CRT or Nicole Hannah-Jones’ work are engaging with particular nuances about the way U.S. American history is being reexamined. Rather, at their most flustered, they have labeled these efforts as un-American and, , anti-Christian.

Today, June 19th, is Juneteenth, a holiday our church has incorporated into our Sunday worship for the past few years. This is a lightly edited version of my sermon from this past Sunday.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Corinthians 3:17)

In this week’s newsletter I’m delighted to feature the following reflection by Dr. Suzie Sang. Dr. Sang responded to my recent social media post - “Beware the colonizer disguised as a multicultural pastor” - and was gracious enough to turn that response into this article. I can’t thank Dr. Sang enough for sharing her experiences and wisdom with us.

Johnny Dark

At some point each day, having listened to the same song most of the day, Johnny Dark takes out his phone, points it toward a mirror in his darkened home before hitting record, and begins to sing. When he’s finished he uploads the song to his YouTube channel where it joins a collection that has been building for years.

I can predict when it will happen. During the past twelve months, I’ve been invited to more online Q & A sessions than I can remember with groups around the country who are reading Rediscipling the White Church. (Let me know if you’ve got a group reading the book and would like me to drop in!) I genuinely love these conversations and have learned a lot from these women and men who are committed to leading their churches and communities to racial solidarity. It’s super encouraging.

Earlier this week I posted the following reflection on social media. It provoked enough responses there that I thought it might be worth sharing here as well. And if you’re not a preacher, or don’t particularly care about sermons, don’t worry, this is about more than the length of a sermon.

Like most of you, I was paying close attention earlier this week to the verdict in the trial for the man who murdered George Floyd. Also like many of you, I felt a range of emotions when the guilty verdicts were announced. On Tuesday night I reflected on some of those mixed emotions for Missio Alliance.

I was jogging on the path that runs alongside Lake Michigan in Chicago when the verdict in the trial of the man who murdered George Floyd was handed down yesterday. As soon as the news broke that the verdict was imminent, I kept checking my notifications and refreshing my social media feeds, hoping for a hint of what the decision might be. I noticed an ache creeping into my stomach, as though my body were preparing for the sudden absence of justice, once again denied. And so I layered up against the cold wind blowing off the lake and began my slow pace north.

In this week’s newsletter I’m sharing a lightly edited version of my sermon today from Genesis 16.