mark feldmeir

Anti-immigrant sentiment

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” It was a beautiful ideal – an aspiration of the values America sought to stand for. But the ideal was …

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The longing for home

Homesickness – the longing for home. Frederick Buechner points out that the word “longing” comes from the same root as the word “long,” in the sense of length and time, as in, “it’s a long line,” or “it was a long time ago.” So, the word “longing” has its origin in time and distance. But …

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Three suggestions

So, what can we do? Where do we go from here? Can I offer three suggestions? First, if you’re white, listen to people, especially to people of color, who are willing to share about their experiences of racism. By doing so, you will become a more informed student of history and of place so that …

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How can we talk about race without the defensiveness, reflexivity, and scapegoating?

Baltimore, Ferguson, Charlottesville, Charleston. Trevon, Tamir, Sandra, Philando, and Freddie. Kaepernick, Serena, Barkley, and Lebron. White supremacy, white privilege, white fragility, and woke. “Hands up, don’t shoot.” “I can’t breathe.” Black Lives Matter. These are just some of the people, places, controversies, and catchphrases that have come to define the complexities of today’s conversation about …

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Three core commitments

For Jesus, a politics of love manifests itself in the form of compassion, which in Latin means literally to “suffer with another.” Genuine compassion evokes a deep concern for the suffering and well-being of neighbor, and is expressed most fully in the “basileia tou theou,” the Kingdom of God. Life lived in the Kingdom of …

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