Laura Kirk (she/her) is the circulation and administration assistant at Sojourners. She grew up in Springfield, Va., and she loves to pretend she is from D.C. She recently graduated from the College of William & Mary, where she blended her dedication to global peace, nonviolence, cooperation, economic justice, and faith with her major in international relations and minor in religious studies. During her time in college, she founded a campus interfaith organization that brings people of diverse backgrounds together for community, friendship, and wisdom sharing.
Laura is passionate about activism and has organized for a range of issues, including gun violence prevention, Black Lives Matter, climate justice, and addiction recovery. She is also proud to have interned for a campaign that flipped a longtime red district in her hometown blue with the election of the first Asian American women to the Virginia House of Delegates. In addition, Laura loves working with children. She has been a children’s ski instructor, substitute teacher, and camp counselor, and she currently serves as the youth minister at her Episcopal church. She enjoys soaking in all the joy, fun, play, and wonder that kids have to offer.
Laura loves studying contemplative and meditative traditions from Christianity and beyond. She also loves learning about and practicing ways of caring for the environment. She will never pass up an opportunity to camp, hike, bike, ski, or compost. She has recently enjoyed learning (slowly) about gardening and helps steward her church’s outreach garden. You can most likely find her taking long walks through the neighborhood and asking strangers if she can pet their dog.
Posts By This Author
Love Is the Only Sane Response in a Time of Fear
Credit: Unsplash/Designecologist.
In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, Sojourners’ 41st class of fellows gathered to study bell hooks’ prophetic book All About Love . In her writing, hooks not only exposes the structures underpinning systems of oppression but illuminates paths toward dismantling them. Her primary tactic is one we don’t hear much about these days: love.
Published in 1999, All About Love could just as easily have been written amid today’s political upheaval. Hooks calls out fear as a defining issue of our time: “As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination.”