The Editors

Blessed Are the Merciful

In Clemency, Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Alfre Woodard plays Bernadine Williams, a prison warden preparing to oversee her 12th execution. Viewers enter Williams’ mind as she grapples with executing another prisoner. A film with emotional weight and pertinent themes, Clemency raises important questions.

Neon

Songs of Courage

Grammy winner and civil rights icon Mavis Staples offers a powerful message of faith and justice in her 17th album, We Get By. Backed by funk rhythm and gospel-inspired vocals, Staples’ textured voice implores listeners to “be brave in a scary world” and “pray sometime” to bring about much-needed change. Anti/Epitaph

Art and State

Be Recorder: Poems is a shockingly personal yet sharply political collection. Carmen Giménez Smith’s fluid free verse offers an urgent reckoning of self and nation. Giménez calls Americans to account for their complicity in upholding a power-and-profit-driven model and forges the path toward a redefined America. Graywolf Press

Crude Faith

Darren Dochuk’s Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America tells how America’s infatuation with oil gave rise to an American exceptionalism deeply embedded in the Christian faith. Dochuk writes that oil, hailed as a blessing from God, has now become an “imprint on America’s soul.” Basic Books

In “Remembrance and Repentance” (May 2019), Kimberly Burge wrote about her church, founded by Methodists who had split from their denomination in 1844 “so that its members could defend slavery while remaining within the church.”

IN 2015, Pope Francis told inmates at Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility that the purpose of prison is rehabilitation, “to give you a hand in getting back on the right road, to give you a hand to help you rejoin society.” The pontiff said these words in front of a throne-like walnut chair made for him by prisoners participating in Philacor, a program that, according to news coverage about the pope’s visit, offers job training in carpentry, catering, printing, and textiles to those behind bars.

I was hungry and
you blamed it on the communists
I was hungry and you
circled the moon

MAYBE YOU’VE HEARD a land acknowledgement at a conference, sporting event, or worship service. These brief statements name the Indigenous territory on which an event takes place, a small sign of respect to the people who stewarded this land for millennia and whose deep relationship to the land continues today. For any of us who’ve settled on that land, these statements are intentionally unsettling, a way “to counteract the ideologies operating in the Doctrine of Discovery by naming that the land was not empty when Europeans first arrived,” as one group of Canadian churches put it.

But land acknowledgements become trite—an easy checkmark in the social justice box—if they are not part of ongoing relationships with local Indigenous communities. These relationships must include settlers being quiet and listening to some hard truths from Indigenous people about history, responsibility, and reparations.

Absentee Church

Thank you so much for Tom Roberts’ “The Rise of the Catholic Right” (March 2019). This article clearly defines the issues and helps place my position in the church. It is increasingly difficult to develop as a Catholic and a Christian when we see the right wing of the church dominate the conversation. When parts of the church are always condemning and never loving, it makes it difficult to articulate the positive, loving message of my church within society. At times, it is not that people have left the church; it is that the church has left the people.

David Pitt
Kilbarchan, Scotland

Hostile Billionaires

According to Vatican II, the Catholic Church is supposed to be the sacramental presence of Jesus Christ in our time and place. Jesus’ ministry was about love, healing, and forgiveness. While Pope Francis is leading the Catholic Church to become the loving, merciful presence of Jesus Christ, the hostile billionaires referenced in “The Rise of the Catholic Right” are [like the religious leaders of his day] Jesus labeled as hypocrites. It is sad that so many of the hierarchy are fellows with the billionaires.

Thomas Spring
Wailuku, Hawaii

Jesus on Line One

Afro-Latinx artist duendita’s EP direct line to My Creator confronts faith, doubt, and police violence against women of color in a powerful, prayerful debut. Fusing R&B, jazz, and soul, duendita conveys a striking range of emotion through rich, fluid vocals and ambient instrumentals. duendita.bandcamp.com

Spears into Pruning Hooks

Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence offers creative, Christ-centered responses to gun violence. Activist Shane Claiborne and Mennonite pastor-turned-blacksmith Michael Martin engage readers by interspersing the theology, history, and politics of guns with scripture, photos, quotes, and memorials to gun-violence victims. Brazos Press

“SOJOURNERS IS MY favorite Catholic magazine,” readers occasionally tell us. Even though we’re an ecumenical Christian magazine with evangelical-ish roots, the compliment always makes us blush with pride. As we see it, if these pages resonate with Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals alike (as well as folks from Pentecostal, Orthodox, and other traditions), we must be doing something right.

In this interdenominational spirit, we publish “The Rise of the Catholic Right,” by Tom Roberts, executive editor of National Catholic Reporter. Through careful investigative work, Roberts offers an in-depth look at how private—and wealthy—conservative Catholic organizations are using money to exert undue influence in achieving their right-wing political and theological agendas.