Those lines from West Side Story’s rollicking song, “Office Krupke” have come back to tease me over the decades since I first heard them. Are we depraved because we’re deformed? Or because we’re deprived? Some Christians, given their understanding of original sin and our fallen nature, would hold to “deformed.” I suspect that that’s an [...]
Posts from ‘January, 2012’
Rejected Faith
Christianity needs to have more words for “faith.” I want to write about the fact that this Borderlands trip was only the second time in my life where I felt a sense of the depth, and even more so the necessity, of a faith that God is somehow, in some way, present amidst the most [...]
The Eloquence of Maps
By Elizabeth Bukey: Dr. Machado, who organized our pilgrimage to the border, is fond of telling students how important maps are. They can help us understand why wars were fought, the value of certain locations, and, often, tell us something about the mapmaker’s worldview. Certainly the map I found on a postcard in San Antonio [...]
The Desired Change
In the early morning we gathered together, watched and listened to our stories. A morning mist rose as the sun broke through the rising dew. As we walked our bodies split the clouds. Placed next to a Texas highway, we proceeded through the stations of the cross. The Basilica de San Juan falls in a [...]
Poverty Initiative Immersion Course
“I realized that immersions are about something much bigger than, although certainly inclusive of, the experience of the students who participate from Union. Immersions are about being introduced to an entire network of Poverty Scholars Program organizations, committed to the work of developing and uniting leaders to build a movement to end poverty, led by [...]
Youth….”A New and Unsettling Force”
I feel called to work on the role of faith communities in social movements to end poverty, led by the poor. Martin Luther King, Jr said, as he initiated the Poor People’s Campaign: “The dispossessed of this nation…live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize…against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons [...]
Youth….trapped
“My daughter graduated from college last year, an excellent student, but now she can’t get a job in her degree because she is undocumented. She’s lived here for 21 of her 23 years of life, worked hard in school. But now, there’s no hope without the DREAM Act.” “He’s a good boy, a good student. [...]
Healing a Community in Fear
by Elizabeth Bukey: Yesterday afternoon we met two women who both work on healing in the Brownsville community: one a curandera and the other a medical doctor. An outsider, particularly an Anglo Seattleite outsider like me, might think that Maria and Marsha would be very different: a faith healer and an MD, a trance medium [...]
Jesus was Crucified…a Borderlands Interpretation
This morning the Borderlands group walked the stations of the cross on the lawn of the Basilica Cathedral de San Juan del Valle. Each of us chose a different station to reflect upon and incorporate how that station relates to our experiences so far on this trip. We were then assigned to give a short [...]
The Crack of the Third Space
Next time you go to Philadelphia, make sure to stop by the Liberty Bell. It’s been cracked since the birth of this nation. It is the crack that symbolizes the fact that our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence and then went home to their slave-owning homes. It is the crack that haunts us [...]