Three of the Compassion, Peace & Justice ministries of the Presbyterian Mission Agency will present webinars next week, giving Presbyterians and anyone else interested a chance to connect with the timely work of these offices.
“We make our own history,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “The course of history is directed by the choices we make and our choices grow out of the ideas, the beliefs, the values, the dreams of the people. It is not so much the powerful leaders that determine our destiny as the much more powerful influence of the combined voice of the people themselves.”
Traditionally, on the second Monday of October the United States celebrates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492.
However, on Monday many communities across the nation celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day rather than Columbus Day. Indigenous Peoples Day is part of a growing movement to end the celebration of the Italian explorer and rather honor and recognize Indigenous people, the original occupants of the Americas.
The woman from Iraq was dressed completely in black.
It was the first time she had been to Refugee Family Literacy at Memorial Drive Ministries in Stone Mountain, Georgia in two weeks. When Jennifer Green, director of the program, asked what had happened, she learned the woman’s brother had been killed by a car bomb in Iraq.
Green gave the woman a hug, told her she was sad for her, and took her to class, explaining to her teacher what had happened. It was an English-as-a-second-language class for mothers of children in the program’s preschool.
What a trap! They came to put Jesus in jeopardy with the authorities regarding the payment of taxes to Caesar, and he turned it back on them. They were caught in their own theological trap because they had a double standard. They did their best to get along with the Roman authorities, while quietly teaching their people that God — not the civil authorities — must be the ultimate object of their worship. They taught that in the end, everything belongs to God, so when Jesus put before them the coin showing the image of Caesar, they were in a bind. The worship of the one on the coin was a basic principle of Roman citizenship. He was to be worshiped and obeyed not simply as the political primate, but as a god, and therefore a divine alternative to the God of Israel, to whom the Jewish leaders were bound.
After spending 60 years as a man, Paul Williams came out to his family as transgender, becoming Paula.
The married father of three was a prominent evangelical pastor before transitioning and recognized that transitioning would not be an easy process, personally or professionally. Nonetheless, “I’d been called [to transition], and you reject a call at your own peril,” Paula said.
It’s a line that appears twice in the documentary, “Flint: The Poisoning of an American City.”
“What happened here is now happening in other places. It could happen in any city in the United States. It did happen in the city of Flint, Michigan.”
As Sharon Gibbons learns more about the challenges women face around the world, it swells her support for women abroad and motivates her to work harder for gender justice closer to home.
Presbyterians who want to help Haitians dealing with the almost simultaneous effects of natural disaster, government corruption, fuel shortages and crop challenges have at least two choices, according to Fabienne Jean, coordinator of FONDAMA, or Hands Together Foundation of Haiti, a network if 11 farmer organizations across the Caribbean nation currently choked with deadly protests that have paralyzed the economy and closed businesses and schools.
