Politics & Society

Looking Truth in the Eye: A Political Calling

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Richard Freiherr von Weizsaecker gave the first speech by a high-ranking German leader to publicly recall, in painful detail, the evils of the Nazi past. It takes a great leader to undertake, with Psalm 15:4, the moral duty to “swear to our own hurt.” It hurts to remember the moral low points in our history. But healing from them requires that we remember them, specifically and painfully. Von Weizsaecker died on January 31, 2015.

Gender and Sexuality

Church of Latter-day Saints: Way Too Little, Far Too Late

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Mormon leaders said they would not change Church policy on its position on marriage for same-sex couples and the relationship of LGBT people within the denomination. They once said similar things about its policies on people of African heritage and the Church. The church’s efforts to temper its discrimination against such groups is way past due.

art

A Story of My Heart

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I haven’t the faintest idea how to sum up the more than 500 stories uploaded to the People’s State of the Union website since late January. They came from story circles – a hundred people in a church basement or a handful in someone’s kitchen – organized in more than 150 places around the U.S. They came because people resonated with the USDAC’s assertion that “democracy is a conversation, not a monologue.”

Politics & Society

Distributing Power in Social Movements

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Power is actualized in community, among many, and shapes the ways in which our knowledge production impacts both our relationships and also our communities. In this way, power becomes not a force of surveillance but rather a mode of transparency within relationships. The #blacklivesmatter movement has the capacity to embody this style of leadership and enact new forms of power and knowledge.

Environment

Going Beyond Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Non-Discrimination Updates

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This may be fine that Exxon Mobil Corp. has ever-so-reluctantly, though finally, added LGBT workplace protections. However, Exxon Mobil Corp. remains one of the primary environmental polluters in an industry that threatens the Earth and life as we know it. What good are workshop protections in a corporation and in an entire industry that has granted no such protections to our planet?

Gender and Sexuality

This Is Not a Travelogue (With American Jewish World Service in Central America)

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I was in El Salvador with a group of Rabbinic and Graduate students who are Global Justice Fellows with American Jewish World Service (AJWS). I was privileged to be the scholar-in-residence for the group. For nine days in early January we travelled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet with a few of AJWS’ partner organizations who worked as human rights defenders and advocates in the areas of transgender rights, sex workers’ rights, and gender based violence.