The East Jerusalem Hills

6 mins read

It’s been a long day of touring East Jerusalem and getting a crash course on the ongoing silent transfer of Palestinians out of their lands. Our first day began with a tour led by an Israeli guide from The Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD), showing us the “matrix of control” that Israel has installed. Our bus drove from hilltop to hilltop and valley to valley in East Jerusalem, and we stopped in several places where we were shown how a slow strangulation is underway by Israeli settlements which swallow up more and more Palestinian land. Now 20 years old,

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What can you do at a time such as this?

6 mins read

It is at times like these that we, the IPMN, are grateful for the PC(USA)’s longstanding history of prophetic witness to the Israel/Palestine crisis. Since  the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland by the new state of Israel, the Presbyterian Church has been advocating for a just peace. The church has stood for the right to return for Palestinian refugees; an end to the occupation of the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip; and investment policies that ensure we do not profit from human rights abuses or the deadly use of weaponry. 

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Why I’m Marching with Jews to the White House to Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza

8 mins read

Christians bear historic responsibility for the current catastrophe in Israel/Palestine, due to the destructive legacy of anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and imperialism. Alongside Jewish and Palestinian leaders working for peace, Christians must do our part to end the violence. So many people are grieving. In the past week, over 3700 people have been killed in Israel and Gaza. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in the months prior in 2023. As I write this, Israel is telling 1.1 million people in the northern part of Gaza to evacuate as it retaliates against Hamas’s October

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Searching for the Reason in an Unreasonable Law: Israel’s Judicial Overhaul

12 mins read

For 31 consecutive weeks, Israelis have taken to the streets, mostly in Tel Aviv, to protest the decision by the current right-wing government of Israel to initiate an overhaul of its judicial system.  Israel’s “Unreasonableness Law” is a measure that removes the courts’ power to overturn decisions made by Israel’s Cabinet or Knesset, or its ministers, that they find to be “extremely unreasonable”.  The law strips Israel’s Supreme Court of the power to overturn government actions and appointments it deems “unreasonable”.

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Our Church began Divesting from Fossil Fuels. Here’s why (and how!) we did it.

9 mins read

The call to live out our values in the world is nothing new to the members of The First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York. Our church was instrumental in the nomination of the first Black moderator of our General Assembly in 1960. Our members participated in protests against the Vietnam War in the 1970s. We have been early and steadfast supporters of the LGBTQIA+ community. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s sermon, Shall the Fundamentalists Win?, was delivered from our church’s pulpit more than 100 years ago. Arguably the most famous sermon of the 20th century, Fosdick’s sermon exemplifies the

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FFPCUSA and MRTI Recommend United Approach to Divestment

8 mins read

We are living amid an existential and devastating climate crisis, demanding a moral and theological response across global institutions. The urgency of this crisis has only escalated since fossil fuel divestment was first introduced at the General Assembly in 2014. At that time and in the years since, there is one thing that Fossil Free PCUSA (FFPCUSA) and the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) have agreed upon: the gravity of the crisis requires an urgent and robust response.

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Abolition and the Cross: Reimagining Society and Salvation through Restorative Justice

6 mins read

I was recently at a book club facilitated by Abolition Apostles, a Christian abolitionist ministry, where we discussed the book The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition by Lee Griffon. Micah Herskind, a Public Policy Associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights and a Christian abolitionist, led that day’s session and said something that has stayed with me since. He was speaking about retributive justice and its connection to the Christian faith and said, “Do we believe in prisons because we believe in Hell or do we believe in Hell because we believe in prisons.”

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Hallowed but not Sacred: An Epiphany of Capitol Violation

9 mins read

Moderate and progressive Christians have always found it hard to take Donald Trump seriously as a false messiah, much less an actual one. In the name of Trump, some 1000 or so extremists invaded and occupied the Senate and House chambers for several hours on January 6, prompting many Republicans and Democrats to refer to those sites as “sacred” spaces that had been desecrated by force and vandalism. For some, democracy may itself be sacred, by which they mean of highest value. The ritual of publicly counting the electoral votes from the states was thus a sworn duty that was

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Our Country is in the Midst of Twin Pandemics

6 mins read

Our country is in the midst of twin pandemics. One, the coronavirus pandemic, is dominating headlines. The other is a nationwide spike in gun violence. Gun violence is up in cities across the country. On Independence Day Weekend, violence broke out in cities nationwide, including two shootings in my hometown of Dallas that left one dead and four wounded. That local violence has tragically continued since then. Summer violence is, sadly, an American tradition. Each summer, as the temperature goes up, so do incidents of gun violence. This year, if anything, is worse than usual. In June, murder and shootings

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