Courtney Hall Lee

FOOD DESERTS ARE low-income areas in urban or rural locations whose populations lack easy access to fresh fruit, vegetables, and other whole foods, usually because of lack of easy access to supermarkets. In 2010, the USDA reported that 18 million Americans live in food deserts, meaning more than a mile from a supermarket in urban/suburban areas and more than 10 miles in rural areas.

While suburban shoppers have more choices than ever, urban and rural Americans often lack access to quality food choices.

Karen Gonzalez, a church and community engagement specialist in Baltimore, works with immigrant populations. “For our clients, the challenge is that they work a lot, often two jobs, so getting to the grocery store and then cooking is a challenge,” says Gonzalez. “The other issue is that there are only two grocery stores in that part of town, and one of them is in the gentrified district—a Whole Foods. So clients often end up in bodegas or convenience stores, which have limited options and are more expensive.”

Food deserts in rural regions naturally raise different problems than those in urban areas. It is unsurprising that supermarkets are farther from people’s homes, but it can be overlooked that some rural low-income people do not own or have direct access to cars.

“Driving down a two-lane highway in rural Nebraska last spring, I passed a Native American man riding an old bicycle toward the nearby Omaha Indian Reservation,” wrote Steph Larsen on Grist.org. “We were at least seven miles from the nearest town, and he had four grocery bags bulging with food slung over his handlebars as he worked to climb a hill. I’ll bet a week’s worth of groceries that he wasn’t biking for the exercise.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. once famously said: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” And while Christian people of all varieties have repeated this quote over the years, King’s sentiment is still applicable to the U.S. church of 2017.

LifeWay Research, a firm with Southern Baptist roots, performed a study on the problem of segregated worship. According to LifeWay, two-thirds of Americans have never regularly attended a place of worship where they are an ethnic minority. And the secular Pew Research Center states that eight out of 10 U.S. churchgoers worship where a single racial or ethnic group makes up at least 80 percent of the congregation.

For those who desire to change this reality, Intercultural Ministry: Hope for a Changing World serves as an encouraging anthology. Editors Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Jann Aldredge-Clanton have assembled 15 diverse voices in ministry to give their contributions to the conversation on increasing diversity and intercultural worship in the American church.

In the months leading up to the election, president-elect Donald Trump asserted many fabrications as truth, including: that President Obama founded ISIS (with help from Hillary Clinton); that President Obama was not born in the United States; that climate change is a Chinese hoax; and that thousands of Muslims danced in the New Jersey streets after 9/11.

Mr. Trump is not the only one to take liberties with the facts. Fake news on all sides proliferated during the election season: Twenty fake news stories outperformed the top 20 real news stories in the last three months of the election.

Perhaps, given Trump’s recent comments regarding workplace harassment of women, this alliance shouldn’t come as a surprise. He recently stated that he believes women who experience sexual harassment in the workplace should seek remedies within the company or ultimately quit the job if necessary. “I would like to think she would find another career or another company if that was the case,” Trump told USA Today when speaking about his daughter Ivanka hypothetically experiencing harassment.

With the April 23 release of LEMONADE, Beyoncé’s full-length visual album, I am convinced more than ever that “Formation” served as voice crying out on the internet, paving the way for even more conversations about the mistreatment, invisibility, and spiritual essence of black women.

Does it make sense for Hillary and Bernie to court the black vote? Absolutely. I am not troubled by their clamor to win our support. What is truly disheartening is that our support does not ensure racial progress. No one candidate should be held responsible for fixing America’s race problem. But what black voters want is a candidate who is brave enough to say that America has a serious race problem.

While both candidates have put some effort in to this message, for both candidates it was only after they faced protest by Black Lives Matter activists. It was only when the media asked them directly if Black Lives Matter that they answered in the affirmative. 

America’s poor always bear the brunt of manmade ecological problems. Urban air pollution, dwelling near industrial facilities and their waste, and exposure to lead paint are a few of the ways that the poor are put at risk; they face more health problems caused by environmental factors than anyone else. Based on this, I ask this question: Should environmental justice be at the forefront of the church’s social justice ministries?

Congress has repeatedly prevented government research of gun violence out of fear. Opponents of gun research fear what it will reveal — uncovering more information might convince more people that there are problems with American gun laws. By avoiding empirical study, it seems clear that we may already suspect the answers.