Renée Darline Roden is author of Tantur: Seeking Christian Unity in a Divided City.
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Pentecost Is More Than Speaking in Tongues—It’s Learning to Sing Together
In a dark church, a dozen disciples gather in the upper room of the choir loft. We warm up our voices. We practice our hymns. Although we are not silent, in many ways, we are the disciples on the eve of Pentecost: waiting for the Spirit to descend.
I’m a lifelong choir member. I caught the bug in high school, joined a liturgical choir in college because the boy I had a crush on told me to, and I was briefly a member of St. Patrick’s Cathedral Choir in New York City. I keep finding my way up to the choir loft, even when other priorities crowd out my life. And as much as I enjoy cantoring, leading the congregation in song from the ambo, or singing from my pew with full heart and voice, sitting up in the choir loft among a chorus of voices is where I’ve always felt most at home in church.
We Said ‘Never Again,’ but It Seems the Violence Has Never Ended
As a child, Pankaj Mishra, author of ‘The World After Gaza,’ admired Israel’s leaders. A trip to the West Bank began to change his mind.
The World After Gaza: A History, by Pankaj Mishra
PANKAJ MISHRA OPENS The World After Gaza: A History with the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in German-occupied Poland. The Jews imprisoned in the ghetto fought their Nazi captors for “a few desperate weeks” until they were crushed. Mishra quotes one of few survivors, Marek Edelman, who “was ‘terribly afraid’ that ‘nobody in the world would notice a thing,’ and ‘nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out.’”
The Israel Defense Forces’ ongoing destruction of Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas has been livestreamed by journalists, mothers, and teenagers. Globally, many suffered “an inner wound,” Mishra writes, from watching these cruelties: Israel’s bombs targeting children, schools, and hospitals; military dogs mauling disabled Palestinians; and IDF soldiers denying starving people access to food. Despite Palestinian efforts to broadcast the war crimes, Gaza still burns. Mishra contrasts reactions to the atrocities in 1943 Warsaw and in Gaza today to explore Western state-sanctioned violence.
Although Western Allies pledged never to let the genocide of the Holocaust happen again — a promise that has defined Western morality for decades — the violence unleashed in World War II death camps has been repeated across the globe in Japan, Vietnam, Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza.
Mishra, a British Indian writer, links the rhetoric of Israel’s ethno-state to the Hindu nationalism of his native India. From a Hindu Brahmin family, Mishra recalls his childhood admiration of Israel’s leaders and how he, and many other Hindu nationalists, admired their macho tactics.
In a Violent Economy, People of Faith Try Cooperatives
A customer picks up a bag of free pastries from the worker-owned Arizmendi bakery in the morning. in San Francisco, Calif., March 17, 2020. Arizmendi, a worker-owned cooperative, is named after Fr. José María Arizmendiarrieta, the father of modern cooperatives. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
“I’ve realized that the current state of economics is violence, since it violates human dignity,” said Dani Bodette, senior coordinator of Catholic Campaign for Human Development in Chicago. “But cooperatives are a form of nonviolence — they’re a nonviolent economics.”
Why Rikers Alumni Debated Cash Bail with Catholic Students
Kaamilya Finley of Rikers Debate Project speaks at Regis High School in New York City, on May 2, 2022. Renée Darline Roden/Sojourners
In New York City’s Upper East Side, just down the road from the Met Gala’s red-carpet celebrities and flashbulbs, around 400 high school students, teachers, alumni, parents, and formerly incarcerated people came to Regis High School’s auditorium on Monday night to listen to two high school debate students compete against two alumni of the Rikers Debate Project.