Category: justice
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Local Countercultures of Reconciliation and Justice
This was first published in my newsletter earlier this year. I’ve recently been listening to “Motive”, a podcast produced by our local NPR station about the rise of of neo-Nazi skinheads in Chicago and beyond in the 1980’s. It’s pretty troubling stuff, as you can imagine, and it’s hard not to make connections to the…
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The Truth of the Protest
This was first published in my newsletter earlier this year. Why is it that you can know how terribly something will turn out and still be devastated when it does? This is what I was wondering on Wednesday afternoon after the grand jury declined to indict anyone for Breonna Taylor’s killing. When I read about…
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Acknowledgment is better than ignorance. Confession is even better.
This was first published in my newsletter earlier this year. I’m sure some of you saw the new research about Christians and racial justice released by Barna this week. Here are a few relevant sections: There is actually a significant increase in the percentage of practicing Christians who say race is “not at all” a…
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White fragility is spiritual immaturity
This was first published in my newsletter earlier this year. Here’s a confession: I haven’t read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Over the past couple of years, conversation partners have sometimes assumed that I’ve read it – You know, like how DiAngelo writes about white people in her book. – and I’ve generally just nodded…
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Why this time might be different.
I wrote this earlier this year for my newsletter. I spent this week with my family in Wisconsin, mostly unplugged. One afternoon we visited a small bookshop in downtown Woodstock, IL, just across the border. It was my first time in an independent book store since March and, despite masking-up before entering, it felt great…
David W. Swanson 