Over the past weeks and months I have been hearing a lot about food. Immigrant families in Minneapolis too afraid to go to work, school, or the grocery store because of the violent presence of ICE on the streets. Emergency food distribution centers in Kansas running out of food because the need is so great. New Disabled South receiving 18,588 applications totaling $4.1 million worth of $100 and $250 requests for emergency assistance during the November 2025 government shutdown. And on Feb 1, 2026, new work requirements tied to SNAP, the largest food assistance program for families in need in the richest country in human history, started with millions being impacted.
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It’s destabilizing at times, to be awake to the reality that we are witnessing global reordering, systemic transitions, and power struggles that impact the well-being of our world. Shifting climate patterns, economic instability, authoritarian resurgence, and intentional deception campaigns are not just headlines– they impact our bodies' senses and shape our relationships. Depending on the identities that we carry, these collective pressures and struggles manifest in a multitude of privileges, disadvantages, individual and collective traumas. They show up as individual and interpersonal pain, discord in our relationships and material bodies, and these struggles embed into the systems we create to
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When I think of hills, I think of the ones in Missouri. The ones that looked like heads of broccoli to me as a child when the trees were full and green in the summer. The sides of them are blasted open to make way for the highway, putting layers upon layers of rock on display in huge outcrops. I can close my eyes and, even from Connecticut, be back there, nestled between the rises. A place where I feel kept. Here, I feel like I fit in the order of things. In Psalm 121, the psalmist doesn’t look above
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It’s been nearly two thousand years since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, fifty-eight years since the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and eleven years since the murder of Michael Brown Jr. Though centuries separate these tragedies, the injustices that caused them persist. We live amid a moral and systemic bankruptcy: an indecency that allows individuals and institutions to harm with impunity. These are not isolated failures; they are functions of power structures designed to divide, destroy, and deny community and justice. The attitude is simple: either stand with your people, or perish.
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The love of God in our world may not always be obvious. Our relationship with God is so personal and therefore, I think that many of us struggle with the very personal topic of God’s love. I think we can get it when it comes to puppies, kittens and babies. Because they are so cute! But when it comes to the darker things in life, we may not always see God’s love and trust it. But the love of God on a very basic level, is why we have life. (I understand this sentence is loaded, so just stay with
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As an Old Testament specialist, there are few texts which capture my imagination in the way that Ezekiel 37, the vision of the valley of dry bones, does. Of course, this is in large part due to the bizarre imagery. The visuals of bones stitching themselves back together and skin materializing on top sounds more like a scene from a horror film than a vision of hope, healing, and vitality from a biblical text (vv. 6–8). Nevertheless, it is exactly this strangeness that spotlights not only the extent of God’s miraculous power, a consistent theme proven time and time again
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I want to start by being vulnerable with you. It has been hard to write this devotional. Not because my love for God is not strong, nor because I do not enjoy the season of Lent, but like so many of you, my soul feels heavy from the reality of the world. As I write this, our comrades in Minnesota are dealing with the presence of ICE in their state. There have been multiple deaths at the hands of government officials and sitting at my desk, in front of a laptop feels disconnected from the realities of life. I have
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Lent invites us into the dangerous work of remembering. Not the soft remembering of nostalgia, but the disruptive remembering that unsettles empire. Lent calls us to remember who we are beneath the lies that those in power tell us about our worth. To remember who God has been in the long arc of liberation. To remember what it costs to love in ways that cross boundaries, threaten hierarchy, and refuse dehumanization. Across the lectionary texts appointed for Maundy Thursday, a pattern emerges: liberation is never abstract, and love that reorganizes power is always met with resistance. On this night in
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The best book I read this year was Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kawme Adjei-Brenyah. This dystopian, Hunger Games-eque novel was written as a critique of the American prison system. I found it so compelling because the storyline felt so close and so far away all at once. The novel takes up themes of torture, sin, innocence, and harming our neighbors (sometimes inadvertently). When we read Chain Gang All Stars, we hear the echoes of our current prison system in America. In this subtext, Aedjei-Brenyah invites us to think beyond our carceral reality through the power of imaginative fantasy.
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Acts 10 represents the moment where Peter, a man bound by tradition and cultural boundaries, stands in the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion and an agent of the occupying empire. Everything within Peter compelled Peter to not be there for as a Jew he was forbidden to enter the home of a gentile. Peter’s words are revealing, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.” This is a turning point in his
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