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Families belong together
The Rev. Peggy Clarke asks us to help draw attention to immigration policies that separate parents from their children.
I am now asking us to shift the national discussion for one day - any day this week you pick - to use social media to discuss only the horrific federal policy to tear children away from their parents when they cross the border. Please join me for one day (or as many days as you feel compelled; I’m sticking with this for the foreseeable future) to draw attention to what’s happening. (Facebook, June 7)
Tina Porter draws on her own experience to imagine the pain felt by divided immigrant families.
When my children were little, my mother would call from California and say how her arms were hurting from not being able to hold my babies. My arms were hurting, too, but from holding them so long. Now that they are grown, I understand what she meant. But now there is a new meaning for this: parents whose infants and children are being taken from them as they arrive at the border, legally seeking asylum. (Facebook, June 4)
The Rev. Erica Baron considers the fact that some of the children affected by these policies are at “peak separation anxiety age.”
I think now about my own son at 18 months—unsure of everyone unfamiliar, very much needing the comfort of his moms and other caring, familiar faces. And then I think about the mother watching her 18 month old being taken away when she got to our border, on purpose to make her suffer. How she moved heaven and earth to get that child out of an untenable situation, away from violence, only to be separated from a child who desperately needs loving, familiar adults. That is a trauma, to child and mother, that will be with them, in some way, forever. (Facebook, June 7)
Left and right
The Rev. Amy Shaw wonders what happened to common sense.
A large chunk of the far right have become a group of anti-intellectual, Bible-totin’ troglodytes. They are afeared of college education, anyone who talks “furrign,” and “them queers.”.
. . . . And the left? Oh my people we are not any better.
A group of us on the far left have become precious, simpering snowflakes. We are triggered by any deviance from liberal orthodoxy and have carried social justice warrior stereotypes to the point of incoherence. (Chalice Fire, June 4)
The Rev. Andrew Weber notes that the language used by pro-life and pro-choice people shows “potential pitfalls.”
We can see right off the bat that the two sides are not arguing the same thing. On one side we are arguing about choices, on the other we are arguing about life. No one is arguing against choice, and no one is arguing against life. But the issue has been framed in such a way that each side can easily demonize the other. For example, “You are against people having choices!” or “You are pro death!” (Drive Like a Minister, June 4)
The bad president problem
Doug Muder writes that impeachment was created as a way to solve the “Bad president problem.”
The Founders believed that any legitimate sovereignty had to come from the People, but they understood that the People would make mistakes. It was inevitable that sooner or later the United States would elect a bad president — a demagogue who was unwise, uninformed, and temperamentally unfit for the job.
It’s clear what they saw as the primary remedy for a bad president: Wait for his term to end and elect somebody else. . . .
Impeachment is in the Constitution for those rare cases where the country just can’t wait. (The Weekly Sift, June 4)
The Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern draws our attention to a novel by Philip Roth, who died recently.
The Plot Against America proposes that [Charles] Lindbergh wins the 1940 Republican nomination and goes on to defeat FDR. With the anti-interventionist in office, the U.S. stays out of the war; those who do want to fight the Nazis must flee to Canada and join the despised (by President Lindbergh) British forces. With a vocal anti-Semite as President, Henry Ford’s racial theories are given free rein and U.S. Jews have an increasingly uncertain and frightened existence, like immigrants and Muslims in 2018. . . .
It’s a portrait of a nation gradually sinking beneath an internal sea of fascism. (Sermons in Stones, June 1)
She will not be tamed
Nan Lundeen writes about the power of “elemental forces,” specifically the erupting Hawaiian volcano, Kilauea.
She is nothing if not new.
She is nothing if not old.
Her dance with the sea
explodes with an energy
kindred only to her sisters, the stars. (Nature’s Sacred Journey, June 7)