A friend and colleague of mine who does human rights work alongside me mentioned recently that she went on vacation and left her work phone off the whole time, only to fear when she turned it back on she would learn someone she’d been in touch with had been murdered the night before. It wouldn’t […]
Tag: religion
Beatles Mania
As long as I can remember, I’ve always been a Beatles fan. The first album (that wasn’t soundtrack music) anyone ever bought me was a Beatles album my sister got me for Christmas or a birthday one year. I must’ve been twelve or thirteen at the time. I already knew half the songs that played […]
A Responsible Media is a Critical Media
The New York Times ran a cover story today detailing a moment during the insurrection in which seven strangers worked together to attack Capitol Police officers. The profile on the insurrectionists, which the paper of record still refers to as Americans involved in a “riot,” as opposed to an attempted coup, is part of a […]
Fake Russian Christians making fake American Christian content fit for a Coup
Recent MIT research into an internal Facebook report unveiled that of Facebook’s top twenty Christian pages, 19 out of 20 were run by troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia–likely the same Russian-backed “trolls” responsible for the 2016 election. The largest of those Christian Facebook pages, twenty times larger than the next, had a reach of […]
20 Years On and Rethinking Empathy and Reconciliation
I’ve been thinking a lot about an old English teacher, Faye Hardin, who passed away in 2019. She was a tough old bag. Some twenty years ago when I had her my senior year, there were students in my class whose parents and grandparents had her as a teacher. She pushed students harder than most–to […]
R&R in the time of social upheaval
Been on the road a lot lately, which is something I struggle with given that it’s a pandemic, but between N95’s and a vaccine, I’m doing what I can to find the balance I know we’re all seeking. So, between island hoping, West coast adventures, and hiking in the Poconos, the last few weeks have […]
Fear, Loathing, and Love in West Tennessee
My parents are visiting me in Pennsylvania. That’s a good thing, given how long the pandemic took them from me. What came as a surprise, though, now that I’ve bought a house, it seems they decided to bring with them everything I owned from the time I was born. It turns out I was a […]
I Really Hate Fireworks
Listening to the fireworks, I don’t have a whole lot of love for July 4th, and I never have. It’s a holiday that admittedly means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and I have every ounce of respect for that, the grandson of a World War II vet, an Eagle […]
A Theology of Journalism
Before there were “journalists”—even before there was writing—the world’s means of sharing “the news” was an oral and aural experience: stories by the fire intended to describe and explain the human condition; a voice shouting in a crowded marketplace, the agora, what’s come to pass—or what will—if the world continues down the path it’s on; […]
One Year, Alive.
I told myself after a year of “quarantine,” of “surviving” a pandemic, after documenting the months and months of it, that it was only fitting to make sure, one year on, that I would document that too. It’s like a rite of passage, is it not? All the loss and all of the loneliness and […]
saunterings 