Both photos by Kaytee Ray-Riek, who was also an action lead Yesterday I was put in handcuffs by the Philadelphia police and led, wrists behind my back, out of my local electric utility customer service center and into a waiting police van. My crime? Sharing the truth about solar energy with my fellow [...]
After the violence in Charlottesville, an African American friend of mine posted on Facebook that she’d had it with “spiritual white people.” I knew what she meant. As a white woman who has taught classes on spiritual discernment, racism, and social change strategy, I’d been thinking a lot about how to cultivate a spiritual [...]
I'll be speaking this Saturday at a gathering on Climate, Race, and Justice. I find that talk has been rewriting itself over and over in my mind, even though I was supposed to be working on something else today, an article to accompany my book publication in less than two weeks. The intersection between Climate, [...]
When I first started to write The Wisdom to Know the Difference, Hurricane Katrina was still fresh in my mind. Though the following outtake didn't make it into the book, this seems like a good week to remember some of the lessons from that sad chapter in US history: Blaming human caused misfortunes on God [...]
Wallis' point about many of us not living with the poor was illustrated one night several years ago by my perceptive daughter. We were celebrating Lent, the forty days before Easter, when many Christians fast or give up some comfort, while trying to practice a heightened concern for the poor. We had decided to eat [...]
I have two brand new books to plug. The first is Who's Your Mama?: The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers As the press release describes, it is a book of “Narratives by a racially and economically diverse group of women, who broaden the traditional notion of motherhood in the United States by discussing their [...]
When I was in my twenties, looking for a spiritual home, one of the things that attracted me to the Religious Society of Friends was its history of peace and social justice work. Quakers advocated the abolition of slavery, worked on the Underground Railroad, and supported women’s right to vote. Coming from secular activists circles, [...]
I was going to steer clear of the whole Sarah Palin thing—her children, her gender, and certainly her go-go boots. But I just heard a guest on Radio Times accuse a caller of being “sexist” for saying Palin was a “distraction,” and it’s got me thinking about this whole messy business of naming sexism (which [...]
Most often on this blog, I say what I think, and sometimes people post comments. But this week I am hoping to start an actual conversation, with differences of opinion and everything. Here are my queries: When are religious metaphors using light and dark appropriate? When are they racist? Should Quakers be talking about this? [...]
Yesterday in my South African history class we discussed how the Cold War affected US policy toward the decolonizing world after WWII. In short, I said that our concern to win allies and open markets often prompted our government to support oppressive regimes, as long as they were anti-communist. Take the South African government, which [...]