But the work you began 92 years ago continues and now must be continued by legions of women, including me. Thank you.

Thank you for making women’s freedom your life’s work.

Your skills as a writer afforded you the ability to not only see the plight of ordinary women but to envision and articulate a world where our womanhood and rights are respected as equal. Thank you.

Founding Ms. Magazine and giving the multifaceted perspectives of women’s needs an outlet provided women (and men) the opportunity to think beyond their own circumstances. Thank you.

I grew up identifying feminism with you, which wasn’t always positive as my culture often demonized you as the angry white woman. It took me many years to embrace feminism (and you) as the courageously vocal expressions of my inner spirit: to acknowledge and celebrate that my personhood, my womanhood is positive and sacred. Thank you.

I entered and succeeded in a male-dominated profession because you demanded the doors, windows, and roof must be available to women in all fields at equal pay. And when sexism oozed from the floorboards of my progressive professional body, you reminded me that I don’t have to conform to anyone’s expression of success but my own. Thank you.

You modeled how we should listen to fellow women and feminists. When women of color pushed back on the whiteness of the movement in the 1970s, you leaned into the criticism, stayed in relationship, learned, built partnerships, and continued pushing feminism toward a more inclusive understanding of whose voices and experiences must matter. Thank you.

You dealt with a question throughout your fame that I too have faced regarding our decisions to not have children. Even in a New York Times article after your death, they reported on your being child free. Sigh. Seems we still have work to do. Thank you.

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I confess that I took you for granted in the aughts when I naively thought our feminist work was done. You continued to work and wait for women like me to shake the scales from our eyes and realize how much sexism exists in the patriarchal systems in which we work, play, pray, and love. Thank you.

You reflected women’s power in how you built networks of relationships with women. To see your Salons you held in your home well into your 90s, where you invited young women to talk, dream, and strategically fight forward, teaches me how to do the same in my own community. Thank you.

You lit your torch and shared it with generations of us so that we will do the same and continue fighting for the equal rights of all women of color, accessibility, identity, and power. Thank you.

Along the edge of Canal Street in Houston’s East End, a memorial has grown around the place where he was killed.

Flowers fill nearly every available space. Mexican and American flags wave above photographs and candles. Crosses lean against the wall. Stuffed animals sit among bouquets. Lorenzo’s name stretches across the barrier in enormous pink letters.

And everywhere there are words.

Prayers. Anger. Grief. Promises.

People have written directly onto the wall in English and Spanish.

The wall has become a community testimony:

Lorenzo was here. His life mattered. We remember. We are paying attention.

During the prayer vigil, there were clergy, immigrant justice advocates, neighbors, members of Lorenzo’s family, journalists and people who simply came because they believed they needed to be there.

Many of us did not know one another. Yet for that morning, we belonged to one another.

Perhaps that is one of the most sacred things community does.

Community witnesses. Community remembers. Community makes room for grief.

Community says, Your sorrow concerns me because you concern me.

Lorenzo’s son spoke to us that morning and quoted Coretta Scott King:

“Love is such a powerful force. That is the kind of love that impels people to go into the community and try to change conditions for others, to take risks for what they believe in.”

Impels.

Love that moves. Love that shows up on a Houston sidewalk on a hot August morning.

Love that brings flowers, writes on a wall, prays, speaks, listens and remembers someone’s name.

This morning at Bethel UCC, I preached from Romans 12, where Paul describes much the same kind of love.

These are the spiritual practices of Beloved Community.

Community takes shape through the ways we show up for one another.

We create it every time we decide that another person’s life matters to us. Every time we make room for someone else’s grief.

Every time we use our presence, our prayers, our voices and our power on behalf of another person’s dignity.

And sometimes community simply means refusing to let another human being carry life by themselves.

Standing beside that memorial, surrounded by flowers and handwritten words left by people who knew Lorenzo and people who never met him, I could see what that love looks like.

It looks like showing up, remembering, and grieving together.

It looks like refusing to allow someone’s life to disappear unnoticed.

It looks like moving toward one another.

That is what community looks like.

The following are a string of texts I sent to my 15-year old niece because I wanted to share what Ms. Parton’s life and legacy mean to me. My hope is that she learned more about me as well as Dolly! Enjoy!

Hey there, sweetie. I hope you are having a great day at school!

I’ve been thinking about you since Dolly Parton’s death because, well because Dolly’s death has really hit me hard for a lot of reasons.

I thought I would share a few snippets of what she meant to me with you so that hopefully you will learn more about me as well:

The Dolly Show

When I was a little girl (before mommy was born), Dolly had a tv show that came on Sat. afternoons. Nana would turn it on and then go cook supper before granddaddy came home.

Every show began with Dolly descending on a swing singing, “Love is like a butterfly.” I wasn’t a big country music fan, but there was something fun and joyful about her butterflies (she wore them on her jeans) and swinging. And I really wanted to swing with her!

When I see the butterflies now, I think of you because these were symbols of how the beauty of life blossoms into new life. And that’s who you are: a butterfly of life.

9 to 5

When this movie came out in 1980, HBO would play it over and over again (no streaming, you tube, or cell phones back then).

Mommy was 3 years old but Nana and I would watch this movie together about 3 smart women who experienced sexism in their jobs.

One of the things their characters wanted (and got) was a daycare for the children of the employees.

I remember thinking that seemed obvious and of course businesses would provide daycare services for their employees…nope!

I also realized Nana’s own position as a Financial Secretary was an expression of sexism because Nana was more like the accountant for her business but because she was a woman, her title was, “Financial Secretary.”

Here’s an amazing podcast called Dolly Parton’s America that talks specifically about the importance of this movie: Dollitics!

Steel Magnolias

You and your best friend must watch this movie for LOTS of reasons! (My colors are blush and bashful!). It’s about friendship, mother/daughter relationships, and southern women! Dolly’s performance was amazing!

Celebrate Fully Who God Created You to Be – Rhinestones and all!

When I was growing up, Dolly’s looks were everything I was told not to be – big hair (although that went well with the 1980s), lots of makeup, tight dresses, wigs, country music and boobs!

I was always taught that nice young ladies don’t need to flaunt themselves. Dolly laughed at those judgments about her. She was usually the one making the jokes.

Dolly took everything people said about her and placed it out there for everyone to see.

But she did it and set the tone as if to say – I know who I am regardless of what you think!

It takes a lot of confidence to be open about her ostentatious looks and even joke about it while also setting expectations of what she would and would not put up with by anyone.

Acute Business Sense

Dolly excelled as a businesswoman. She held onto the rights of her songs and knew how to invest money wisely. She even ventured into movies like Father of the Bride (another amazing movie) that she produced but had no role in as an actor or singer. She also produced Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which your mom loved!

Dolly also knew how to be a good boss. She paid for college for all of her Dollywood employees. Nobody does that anymore!

Do Unto Others…

I heard that Dolly was picked on as a teenager. And because of that experience, she always treated the underdog as equal!

The LGBTQIA+ community. Dolly knew that a lot of drag queens dressed up as her and even had contests to see who was the best Dolly. One time she dressed up and entered one of these Dolly drag queen contests and LOST! What a hoot!

She was very accepting and never condemned those in the LGBTQIA+ community.

When AIDS was a very scary time and people were being really mean to those with AIDS, Dolly was one of the first to publicly support those with HIV/AIDS and raised a lot of money for them.

Put your $ where your mouth is

Dolly made a lot of money. She could have kept it for herself and built a big house with a private jet and a huge yacht (insert all the billionaire bros here).

Instead, she reinvested her money in her community, whether that was her hometown, the people like her dad who couldn’t read (so she created Imagination Library)

She also donated $1 million for research on the covid vaccine. That was a scary time.

She knew her money could help a lot of people all over the world if she donated it to the medical school at Vanderbilt.

Nana and Granddaddy were able to get the vaccine because of Dolly.

Mattie, in all of my texts, I hope you hear the most important lesson from Dolly’s life (and why so many of us grieve her death):

In a world full of *onalds, be a DOLLY!

I will always love you!

These were the opening words from Andrew Beaver, founder of Clean the Block Houston, as he welcomed us for a Saturday morning of cleaning the blocks of a Fifth Ward neighborhood.

Houston has a problem with illegal dumping, primarily from companies, construction crews, and landlords who dump unused construction materials, old furniture, and tons of trash along the streets of Houston neighborhoods.

Mr. Beaver is a real estate investor who grew tired of calling the government to report these illegal dumpings and waiting for months on end. So he decided to spend an hour every day cleaning up one street, one block, one neighborhood.

He filmed himself on Instagram and shared what he was doing and why he was cleaning the blocks. Then he invited people to join him, including one Saturday a month for four hours.

And he started a nonprofit called Clean the Block.

Which is what I did yesterday.

Believe me when I tell you it was hot.

Houston hot. Houston in August hot.

And believe me when I tell you I needed to come out and join community after the continued onslaught of illegal dumping from our current president and his administration. I needed to put on my gloves, meet my neighbors out in the street, and clean the block.

I worked with Caleb from Mobile and Robert from Los Angeles. I drank water with Sheryl and ate ice cream with Julian, who made it and served it to us.

There were local Black fraternity brothers and young professionals. There were grandmothers and mothers who brought their children and teenagers.

One mother told me that she intentionally takes her children to volunteer because she wants them to grow up knowing how to give back to their community.

Mr. Beaver is quick to remind us that we are not only cleaning trash from the neighborhood. We are restoring dignity to the community.

We are practicing Beloved Community.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used Beloved Community to describe a way of living together grounded in the equal worth and dignity of every person, where our lives are bound up with one another.

Some of the people I met lived in the Fifth Ward. Others had driven in from different parts of Houston. But for those few hours, those distinctions mattered less than what we were doing together.

We were neighbors.

That is what I felt as I greeted people who lived on the streets we were cleaning and worked alongside people I had only just met.

We belonged to one another, and this neighborhood belonged to all of us to tend.

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The prophet Isaiah gives us language for this kind of restoration of community:

We are the repairers of the breach and the restorers of the streets on which we live, work, play, and pray!

Yes!

Now here’s a bit of geeking out on the actual meaning of these words because they reveal much more than our English translation.

The Hebrew word translated repairer is goder, which means to wall up or fence around.

The image is wonderfully physical. Something has broken open, and someone goes directly to the broken place to rebuild it.

And the word translated breach, perets, means exactly that: a gap, a rupture, a place where something meant to hold has given way.

The phrase translated streets to live in is closer to paths for dwelling, the smaller ways people actually walk through a neighborhood.

The roads we cleaned in the Fifth Ward are paths for dwelling. And Clean the Block, Mr. Beaver, and all those volunteers are restorers of those paths.

We are also repairers of the breach, going directly to the gaps in our communities.

Illegal dumping is a breach in the fabric of a neighborhood. It marks a place where structures meant to protect a community, code enforcement, city services, basic accountability, have given way and trash pours through the gap left behind.

Andrew Beaver has become a goder in Houston communities, going directly to the site of the breach with his own hands and inviting all of us to join him in repairing the paths of our dwelling.

Yes!

This is how we build and restore Beloved Community.

But Isaiah takes us even deeper.

The prophet was speaking to people who knew what it meant to live among ruins.

The breaches in their community were immense and must have seemed impossible to repair without the Divine.

And yet, as no one was coming to liberate them, the Divine was already moving within and among them.

They were the repairers of the breach.

They were the restorers of the streets.

Isaiah wasn’t asking them to wait for someone else to rebuild what had been broken.

The sacred work of restoration belonged to them.

“The government is not going to come and save us. We must save ourselves.”

Maybe Andrew Beaver’s words are not as far from Isaiah as they first sound.

Because saving ourselves does not mean saving ourselves alone.

It means recognizing the Divine moving among us as we pick up our gloves and trash bags, step into the street, greet the people who live there, and put our hands on the places where our communities have been torn open.

There are breaches everywhere right now.

There are breaches in our neighborhoods.

Breaches in our democracy.

Breaches in the ways we speak to one another.

Breaches in our willingness to recognize the dignity of our neighbors.

Some of those breaches are immense. Some feel beyond our ability to repair.

And still, we go to the breach.

One street. One block. One neighborhood. One relationship. One community at a time.

Saturday morning in the Houston heat, I watched people walk directly toward a breach with gloves on their hands.

They picked up broken furniture and construction debris. They hauled bags of trash.

They drank water together. They ate homemade ice cream. They greeted neighbors. They tended paths for dwelling.

And somewhere in all of that ordinary, sweaty, sacred work, Beloved Community became a little more visible.

The Divine was already there.

And maybe that is how we make it through this moment.

We find the breach closest to us.

We go there together, put our hands to it, and we repair.

We are the Repairers of the breach.
We are the Restorers of our streets.
We are the Builders of Beloved Community.

Clean the block.

Public Persistence.

That is how I would describe the work and journalism of Ida B. Wells.

Her work was public. She published stories about lynchings, first in her native Memphis and then across the country.

She investigated the stories white newspapers told about the people who had been murdered. She gathered names. She gathered numbers. She documented patterns.

And she was persistent.

White mobs threatened her life. Her newspaper office in Memphis was destroyed while she was away.

Ms. Wells continued her investigative journalism from New York and eventually Chicago, refusing to allow racial terror silence her.

Ms. Wells understood something about lynching that America desperately needed someone to say aloud.

People might prefer not to talk about racial terror and violence, even as white crowds gathered to witness these brutal, inhumane acts while Black communities lived with the knowledge that any one of them could become the next victim.

Ms. Wells also knew that if someone did not document these murders as they happened, with names and facts and data, the truth would disappear beneath whatever story white America found more comfortable to tell.

And so she wrote. And spoke. And investigated. And wrote some more.

In 1909, seventeen years after she began her anti-lynching campaign, Ms. Wells stood before the National Negro Conference in New York City and named the pattern plainly:

That national remedy would take more than a century.

Lynching did not become a federal hate crime in the United States until 2022.

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And yet, in the past few years, odd incidents have occurred where African Americans have been discovered hanging from a tree.

In September 2024, 39-year-old Dennoriss Richardson was found hanging in an abandoned house in Colbert County, Alabama.

Local authorities ruled his death a suicide. His family challenged that finding. The local sheriff eventually asked the FBI to investigate, acknowledging that an independent investigation was necessary.

In September 2025, 21-year-old Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging from a tree on the campus of Delta State University in Mississippi.

The state medical examiner ruled his death a suicide, and authorities reported no evidence of assault. His death nevertheless drew immediate national attention because a Black body hanging from a tree in Mississippi carries a history that cannot simply be separated from the scene itself.

In February of this year, 21-year-old Kyle Bassinga was found hanging from a tree in a Cobb County, Georgia, park. Investigators concluded there was no indication of foul play.

Even county leaders publicly acknowledged why the circumstances of his death caused fear and disbelief within the community: the historical reality of lynching is still present in our collective memory.

And then, on August 3, 29-year-old Tasia Fortune was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant house in Jackson, Mississippi. Her death remains under investigation.

Yet, her mother, Christy Spivey, said, “She did not do this to herself.”

I do not know what happened to Ms. Fortune. Neither do investigators yet.

I do know what the history of this country requires of us when a Black woman is found hanging from a tree in Mississippi.

Attention. Questions. Transparency. Accountability.

Persistence.

Because the question is larger than whether any individual death is ultimately determined to be murder or suicide.

What does America owe Black families when someone they love is found hanging from a tree in a country where hanging was deliberately used as racial terror?

What kind of investigation is required when the circumstances themselves evoke generations of justified fear?

How transparent should law enforcement be with families and communities carrying that history?

And who will keep asking when the story disappears from the news?

Ida B. Wells understood that last question.

She understood how quickly a death could become a statistic. How quickly a statistic could disappear.

How quickly the official explanation could become the only explanation anyone remembered.

So she kept records. She said names. She asked questions. She demanded evidence.

She made the private terror experienced by Black families a matter of public concern.

Where is that public concern now?

Where is the outrage from those of us who are white when Black families tell us they need answers?

Where is our willingness to stay with these stories after they leave our social media feeds?

Where is our insistence that every investigation be thorough enough, transparent enough, and independent enough that families can trust what they are being told?

Public persistence.

That is what this moment requires.

Public persistence means refusing to let these names disappear.

This week, say one name at your dinner table, in your book club, at church, or in the group text you have gone quiet in.

Say Tasia Fortune.

Say Dennoriss Richardson.

Say Trey Reed.

Say Kyle Bassinga.

Then ask the question Ida B. Wells spent her life asking:

What happened?

And keep asking until the answer can be trusted.

Public persistence can also look like one letter.

Contact the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and ask what role the federal government should play when deaths such as these evoke the racial-terror history of lynching. Ask what standards determine when federal civil-rights review is warranted. Ask how families can request independent scrutiny when they believe a local investigation is inadequate.

And if you are white and reading this, ask another white person whether they have heard any of these names.

That question alone may tell us something about whose grief becomes national news and whose grief remains largely within their own communities.

That is public persistence.

One name. One letter. One question.

And then another. And another. And another.

Until the truth can no longer be ignored.

When I was in seminary, I worked part time as a youth minister at a local church. I learned a lot about church dynamics in that position, especially the dynamics of the adults.

There was a young man who had been coming to our youth group and he was…well, let’s just say he was known for being unruly.

I will admit, he was a handful. He was rowdy and disruptive and a bit too much. But this was not my first youth group rodeo. I could handle all kinds of teenagers!

And I kept thinking to myself, “There’s something causing him to show up here, with these young people, week after week. Let’s lean into that and go from there.”

The adults had other ideas.

They insisted that he not be allowed to come to Sunday School or youth night until he could show that his behavior had changed.

I listened to their perspective and then shared my own that I could handle him and there was a reason he kept showing up week after week.

The adults listened to my perspective and then in good church fashion, the adults went over my head and complained to the pastor.

In my conversation with the pastor, he sided with the adults because he was conflict avoidant.

And to top it all off, the pastor said, “Ginny, time will heal all wounds”

In my youthful impatience, that last comment set me off.

Time will heal all wounds? Really?

So this young man, who trusted us enough to come to this church, was supposed to accept the edicts of the adults, disappear for a while, and wait for time to heal whatever wounds we had just deepened? Humph.

At the same time, I sat in my New Testament class and studied the stories of Jesus, who healed people on the Sabbath, ate with people respectable society rejected, and crossed all kinds of boundaries in the name of relationship.

I just couldn’t believe that Jesus would have told this teenager in my church to leave the group until he could return more well behaved.

If Jesus invited himself to Zacchaeus’ house for supper while ole Zach was still sitting in the tree, I’m betting Jesus would have dug deeper into relationship with this young man too.

He would have wanted to know what was happening in his life, what challenges he was carrying, and what he needed from this community that kept drawing him back.

I’d like to tell you that the young man eventually returned. He didn’t.

He stopped coming.

And the church kept meeting (quietly relieved that their order had been restored).

We kept singing hymns about love and welcome. We kept talking about loving our neighbors.

And somewhere along the way, a young man who had trusted the church (and me) with all of who he was learned that our welcome had limits.

I have thought about that young man many times over the years.

And I have thought about the pastor’s response that time will heal all wounds.

Maybe that is true of some wounds, but time does not heal injustice on its own.

Time does not repair harm when no one is willing to name it.

Time does not make things right simply because the people who are uncomfortable would prefer that everyone wait quietly.

So what does patience look like in the midst of injustice?

I’ve been sitting with this question as we are 18 months into this second administration.

With bans, legislation, and immigration overreach, there are more and more people standing outside the door of our communities told they can’t come in until they assimilate to the powerful.

My youthful impatience now has grey hair, but I still feel that urgency to do something when people are being harmed. I still bristle when we are told to calm down, wait, trust the process, give it time.

Maybe impatience with grey hair teaches us that although justice often takes time, we must channel our impatient urgency into building relationships that lead us toward justice together.

That kind of impatient urgency demands that we stay engaged, keep showing up and affirming God’s image in the other person.

That kind of impatient urgency stands on the outside with the excluded while dismantling the systems of comfort for the powerful.

The impatience of grey hair prioritizes relationships with the most vulnerable until justice is realized for them and all of us.

How will you leverage your impatient urgency for the sake of working toward justice now?

Last Saturday, I joined my neighbors to march to the Montgomery County Detention Center, where two of Lorenzo Salgado’s co-workers have been held since his killing.

Our march began at a nearby neighborhood park (about an hour from Houston). We wound our way through the neighborhood onto a busy road.

The road that led us to the ICE prison is named Redemption Way.

Ha!

Redemption Way.

The preacher in me had about 100 sermons ready to preach about who needed to be redeemed. (Hint: it’s not our imprisoned immigrant neighbors.)

At the front of our procession was a veteran of both the Marines and the Army, carrying an upside-down American flag, a traditional signal of distress.

I can’t tell you how powerful it was to be led by a veteran, who had once served this nation and was continuing his service by leading us on this march.

As always, my march companions were wonderfully diverse: old and young, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, Black, brown, and white; people who traveled from Houston, an hour away, and fellow northern suburbanites.

We held signs, made sure everyone was drinking plenty of water and replenishing electrolytes, and chanted, Justice for Lorenzo.

When we arrived at the detention center, people spoke. Then we called out the names of Mr. Salgado’s co-workers so they might hear us and know:

You are not alone.

The minister in me wanted to offer a prayer, so I did so silently, blessing each person being imprisoned with strength and courage in this scary time.

And then we made our way back, walking, chanting, and protesting along Redemption Way.

There will be more of these marches. There should be more of these marches until ICE is disempowered from carrying out these unjust practices.

Until then, I invite us to ponder these questions together:

Mr. Roberson comes down his stairs and sees someone stealing a package from the front door. He waits. He watches, hoping the person doesn’t take the package. But alas, the person takes the package, and then Mr. Roberson presses a button.

The package explodes in glitter and colored powder.

Cue the music and Mr. Roberson begins to dance. Sometimes to Charlie Brown music, sometimes to the Macarena.

Turns out, Mr. Roberson doesn’t have a theft problem.

He finds videos where homeowners have booby-trapped packages with glitter and colorful dust that explode on thieves as they leave their house.

Then Mr. Roberson edits himself into the action with music and dancing.

I love these videos right now. Perhaps because, just for a few seconds, there is a sense of good news that someone doesn’t get away with injustice.

And perhaps because he’s just so joyful at the end with his music and dancing.

As one viewer said: “I come for the porch pirate glitter bombs. I stay for the music and dancing.” Me too.

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And can’t we all use a little music and dancing right now?

There are days when it feels like there is no justice.

The current president continues to do things I once believed a president simply could not get away with. Institutions I thought would hold seem increasingly fragile. People with enormous power make decisions that affect the lives of ordinary people and seem insulated from the consequences.

And then I open Instagram and watch a porch thief disappear into a cloud of purple glitter.

For a few seconds, justice wins.

Of course, glitter bombs aren’t justice. And I don’t actually believe justice means watching someone get what they deserve.

But lately I’ve been wondering why these fun videos feel like more than an escape.

What do purple glitter, music and dancing have to do with staying human when the world feels profoundly unfair?

The gospels are filled with stories of Jesus proclaiming good news to people in small villages and towns.

What is good news when the powerful keep getting away with injustice?

For much of my Christian life, I heard “good news” translated into a formula: believe in Jesus and be saved. But lately I have found myself lingering over what the Gospel writers actually say.

Jesus proclaimed good news before anyone had constructed a doctrine about him.

So what, exactly, was the good news he was proclaiming?

Jesus walked through towns and villages filled with ordinary people living under the power of the Roman Empire.

Families worked hard for little money while taxes extracted more from them than the wealthy. Sounds familiar.

So when Jesus entered their villages proclaiming good news, how did they hear it?

Was it welcomed solace that someone saw them and named their condition as temporary and their identity as holy?

Were they skeptical until Jesus sat at their tables, ate in their homes and received their generosity?

Did they begin to believe this good news because Jesus didn’t simply preach God’s love to them? He embodied love among them.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that when Jesus stood in the synagogue at Nazareth to describe his calling, he reached back to the prophet Isaiah: good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom for the oppressed.

That sounds very different from a formula for individual salvation.

It sounds like good news that people could experience in their bodies and their communities now!

Hungry people ate. People pushed to the margins were welcomed to the table. Those who had been told they were unworthy were treated as beloved.

People carrying shame were restored to community. The poor were centered. The powerful were challenged.

Jesus wasn’t offering people a rigid doctrine and asking them to put the correct label on it.

He was proclaiming and embodying another way of understanding who had worth (everyone), who belonged (everyone), and what kind of world was possible (all have dignity and worth).

And perhaps that was part of what made the news so good.

Empire had told these ordinary people their lives were worthless.

Jesus told them their condition was temporary and their identity was holy.

I keep returning to that distinction because I need it right now.

Before 2025, I don’t know that I would have contemplated the question, Is there good news in the midst of an Empire’s power grab against ordinary people?

Now I find myself asking it all the time.

Where is the good news when trans children are told they are not good as they are?

Where is the good news when immigrant families are made afraid to leave their homes?

Where is the good news when sacred land is desecrated to construct a useless border?

Where is the good news when people in power appear able to do whatever they want?

Maybe the good news begins with refusing to allow Empire to tell us who we are.

You have worth. You belong. You were created in love and for love.

And no president, government, detention center, executive order or powerful institution gets to revoke that.

Maybe that is why I keep watching Mr. Roberson.

Yes, the glitter bomb is satisfying. For a fleeting moment, someone doesn’t get away with doing harm.

But then the music starts. And Mr. Roberson dances.

There is something about that joy that feels like good news to me right now.

Because Empire doesn’t only want our power. It wants our attention. Our energy. Our fear. It can consume so much of our lives that resisting it becomes the only thing we know how to do.

But Jesus proclaimed something larger.

You are beloved. You belong. Your life has dignity. Your neighbor’s life has dignity. Another way of living together is possible.

That is good news worth embodying, fighting for. And yes, good news worth dancing to.

Empires crumble. Liberative love keeps dancing! Let’s dance!!!

Today is my 55th birthday. Woohoo!

I grew up loving my birthday because my mother lavished her immense love on my special day just like she did with my younger sister.

She made birthday cakes, gave us fun presents, and, when I was an adult, called me at midnight so she could be the very first person to wish me a happy birthday.

I still love my birthday even and especially at 55 years old.

But since my mother died three years ago, it has also become a bittersweet time of remembering my mama. Tears of grief and deep appreciation nourish my spirit each year.

Every person deserves to be loved and celebrated that fully on their birthday.

I hope you are.

Recently, I have been thinking about our immigrant neighbors currently being held in our nation’s detention facilities - no our nation’s immigration prisons.

They have birthdays, too. Yet some are spending those birthdays imprisoned by a government that has chosen prison camps as its response to immigrant children and families.

I have thought especially about the children and teenagers being detained on their birthdays.

Jorge turned fourteen inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, a facility operated by the private prison company, CoreCivic.

Someone made Jorge a small cake out of items from the commissary.

That was his birthday party.

Children at Dilley have described being held for weeks beyond the legal limit, going without adequate food and medical care, and living through virus outbreaks and lockdowns.

This is where Jorge turned fourteen.

Jorge is not alone.

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The Marshall Project reports that ICE has imprisoned more than 6,200 children during this current administration, with approximately 170 children being held on an average day. That is six times the average during the previous administration.

At least 500 of these children have been babies and toddlers.

More than one thousand children have been held longer than the twenty-day limit established by law.

Somewhere among these thousands of children, another birthday is happening right now.

Another child is waking up behind walls.

Another parent is trying to create a celebration with whatever can be purchased from a commissary.

Another teenager is wondering whether anyone outside knows they are there.

In this brief video, fifteen-year-old Alexander Perez speaks from Dilley and offers encouragement to other young people in detention:

Our country is imprisoning children and teenagers.

That is wrong and immoral.

Children belong with families and communities where they can be safe, fed, cared for, educated, and loved.

Detention prison camps cannot provide those things, no matter what language our government or a private prison company uses to describe it.

What troubles me almost as deeply as the detention itself is how easily it has entered the background of our public life.

Where is the sustained demand that these children be released?

Where are the voices of faith communities that gather every week to proclaim that every human being carries sacred worth?

Where are those of us who say we love our neighbors?

Faith communities cannot proclaim that children are beloved by God while remaining quiet about children spending birthdays in detention.

Our worship must become witness. Our prayers must shape our public actions. Our love must become visible beyond the walls of our sanctuaries.

One day, these children will remember where they spent their birthdays.

They will remember the walls, the uncertainty, the separation, and the small cakes made from commissary food.

They may also remember the people who spoke their names, demanded their freedom, supported their families, and refused to let their suffering disappear from public view.

Until they are free, I hold them in my spirit.

As I enjoy my birthday while grieving my mother’s death today, I hope that children in immigration prisons can somehow feel the love of their own families reaching toward them through the walls.

I hope that love helps carry them through this hell on earth.

But holding them in our spirits is not enough.

We must call our elected officials and demand our children and youth be released.

We must support the organizations providing legal assistance to detained children and families.

We must demand that our faith community pray publicly, speak clearly, and act consistently for their release.

We must share the video of Alexander Perez.

We must sing and share the hymn below with your congregation.

Jorge, Alexander, and the thousands of children like them deserve birthdays like ours: cake, presents, family, freedom, and someone who loves them enough to call at midnight.

A Hymn for Our Detained Neighbors

My colleague Carolyn Winfrey Gillette writes hymns for the church. She recently wrote this hymn in response to the disappearance of our immigrant neighbors into ICE detention.

Her words ask us to confront what is happening behind walls we cannot see and what our faith requires of us now. I invite you to read it slowly. Sing it in your congregation. Allow its questions to remain with you.

Tune: Traditional melody (“Though I May Speak”)
Text copyright © 2026 by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. All rights reserved.
Email: carolynshymns@gmail.com
New Hymns: www.carolynshymns.com

For the past eight weeks, I have been writing about ordinary women leading their communities through times of crisis.

I will confess to you that I created this series because I needed it.

As each new headline seemed to pull us further away from the values I had always believed defined a healthy society, I found myself asking a simple question:

How do we stay human and lead when everything we’ve known as good and honorable feels turned upside down?

Our mistake in moments like this is believing our crisis is unprecedented.

The women in this series reminded me otherwise.

Every generation has faced moments when injustice became normalized, when those entrusted with leadership abandoned the common good, and when ordinary people were left to decide what kind of neighbors they would become.

Again and again, ordinary women stepped forward to build, protect, organize, and serve their communities through the crisis.

That realization led me to research not only history but also the science of how human beings respond to crisis.

Researchers have found that our nervous systems recognize danger before our conscious minds fully understand what is happening. We prepare to fight, flee, or freeze. Left unchecked, chronic stress can leave us exhausted, isolated, and unable to imagine a way forward.

Yet researchers have also discovered something equally important.

Human beings recover in relationship.

Our nervous systems calm in the presence of steady people. Shared meals, trusted friendships, familiar rituals, and communities of care help restore our capacity to think clearly and act wisely.

Disaster researchers have observed something similar on a community level. Communities do not suddenly become resilient when crisis arrives. They draw upon relationships, trust, and networks that have often been quietly growing for years.

Crisis does not create community. It reveals it.

That is precisely what I saw in the women whose stories we have shared together.

Eula Gray Allison understood that education was essential to the freedom of formerly enslaved families and helped build schools despite Jim Crow segregation.

Laura Smith Haviland cultivated relationships that enabled her home to become part of the Underground Railroad.

Mitsuye Endo challenged the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans because she believed it could not continue.

Bishop Yvette Flunder refused to abandon people dying during the AIDS epidemic because every person deserved dignity in both life and death.

The Grandmas of the American Indian Movement protected culture, children, and community through generations of resistance.

The women who cared for neighbors during the 1918 influenza pandemic stepped into public health long before government systems were prepared to respond.

None of them waited for perfect conditions.

They simply responded to what was directly in front of them.

As I reflected on these women, I realized they all embodied what I have come to call Moral Feminist Witness.

It begins with moral clarity: recognizing what protects human dignity even when others cannot or will not.

It draws upon feminist wisdom: the often unseen work of organizing, nurturing, building relationships, and sustaining communities.

And it becomes witness when ordinary people refuse silence and act for the sake of their neighbors.

Each woman said yes, not to the loudest voices around her, but to the quieter voice within urging her to do something.

Start and fund a school, open your home, care for the sick, challenge an unjust law. Protect your community.

They saw injustice and responded.

They used the ordinary resources already at their fingertips to build stronger communities.

These stories represent only a drop in the ocean of ordinary women, who have practiced Moral Feminist Witness throughout history.

Perhaps this is what Moral Feminist Witness has always been.

For generations, ordinary women have practiced the work of holding communities together through crisis.

Now it is our turn.

What ordinary act will you do to build community through this crisis?

Be the kind of ancestor future generations will thank for carrying justice forward.

Every year, my mother made calendars.

Not fancy calendars. Just simple ones with birthdays carefully written onto each month. Every cousin. Every aunt and uncle. Every grandparent. Every great aunt and uncle.

Year after year after year, she wrote each name by hand, making sure no one was forgotten.

My cousin’s birthday is in May. Her sister’s is in August, the same month as their mother, my Aunt Martha.

We never lived in the same town, yet decades later I still remember those birthdays because my mother made sure I saw them every year.

Long before computers, Word documents, or Shutterfly, she created calendars for our extended family.

Every birthday became an invitation to reach for the phone, send a card, whisper a prayer, or simply remember someone with love.

Wherever we lived, in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, or Tennessee, we remained a family because every birthday invited us to remember one another.

Those calendars became our family’s glue.

I imagine my grandmother whispering a special prayer on each birthday. I picture Aunt Grace smiling a little wider when someone’s day arrived.

Love traveled in ordinary ways: through a phone call, a birthday card, a note tucked into the mail, or simply remembering to think of someone on the day they entered the world.

I don’t think I fully understood the gift my mother was giving us until I moved away and continued receiving those calendars myself. Even when I was homesick, opening that calendar reminded me that my family was still walking through the year with me.

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After my husband and I married, I found myself carrying on mother’s tradition.

By then, I traded handwritten names for Word documents and Shutterfly. I added photographs alongside birthdays, gathering pictures from family albums and social media so our calendars told the story of our lives together. It became my way of weaving our two families into one.

Sometimes I wonder whether making the calendars is still worth the time.

Then I pull out an old calendar.

I see the faces of family members who are no longer here. I remember birthdays we celebrated together. I remember seasons of life that photographs alone cannot capture. Those old calendars become a record not simply of dates but of relationships.

Every birthday that appears on my calendar is still an invitation to pause and send love. Some receive a phone call. Some receive a text. Some receive only a prayer because they now live beyond this life.

Either way, love continues its work.

Perhaps that’s what my mother was teaching all along.

Families aren’t held together by geography. They’re held together by the small, faithful practices that remind us we belong to one another.

A calendar may hold the days.

But love is what holds us together.

What does it mean to be an ally in the fight for human rights?

Make a statement? Donate to a cause? Post on social media? Go to a protest? Put up a yard sign?

I think being an ally is much more than all of those important actions.

Allyship requires investing your privilege in the work to dismantle discrimination in an active and sometimes dangerous way, even and especially when that requires sacrificing your privilege for the sake of justice and equity for someone else.

What if the front steps of your very house became the doors to freedom? Would you be willing to stand as an ally while opening your very home to possible danger and threat?

Laura Smith Haviland was this kind of ally.

In the 19th century, she not only advocated for the abolition of enslavement, she opened the front doors of her Michigan farmhouse as the first stop on the Underground Railroad in Michigan.

Long before allyship had a name or academic description, Ms. Haviland embodied the grit and determination needed to fight for the freedom of thousands of enslaved men, women, and children.

Ms. Haviland’s life asks us to imagine something heavier.

She traveled into slave states under false identity, once passing as a light-skinned Black woman’s companion to reach a Kentucky plantation.

She went to Tennessee to retrieve the children of Willis and Elsie Hamilton, formerly enslaved parents whose children were still held by the family’s old owner.

When the owner tried to force their return through legal threat and violence, Haviland and her neighbors stood between them and the Hamilton children until a sympathetic judge delayed the case long enough for the family to escape to Canada.

It made her a body willing to be spent in service of other people’s freedom.

Allyship is a dance of knowing when to lead with your privilege and force open the doors of injustice, while also knowing when to step back and support people of color as they demand their own freedom.

Mrs. Haviland knew how to do both.

When Mrs. Haviland was working at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, she became friends with Sojourner Truth.

One time, the two boarded a streetcar together. Ms. Truth stepped onto the car first, and when the conductor pushed her back, she told him plainly, “I am a lady, too.”

At the next transfer, a passenger asked whether Black people were allowed to ride, and the conductor seized Ms. Truth by the shoulder to force her off.

Ms. Haviland took hold of Ms. Truth’s other arm and told him he was not putting her out. The conductor turned to Ms. Haviland and asked if Ms. Truth belonged to her.

“No,” she said. “She belongs to humanity.”

Ms. Truth had already claimed her own dignity before Ms. Haviland ever spoke. Ms. Haviland’s role was not to speak for her.

It was to plant her feet next to a woman who had already spoken for herself, stand where the danger lands, and stay there.

That is allyship’s real shape.

Ms. Haviland stayed in that posture for more than sixty years, through the war and past it, touring former plantations to collect the chains and irons used on enslaved people so white audiences who had never seen such things could no longer claim ignorance.

She died in 1898 in her late eighties. At her funeral, a choir of Black and white singers sang together, and Black and white pallbearers carried her casket to the grave.

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Today we need the allyship of Laura Smith Haviland: stealth and strategic while also vocal and unafraid.

A Moral Feminist Witness understands that we need allies willing to open more than their mouths.

We need people willing to open their homes, their wallets, and their minds to how they must be a part of dismantling the oppressive system.

We need allies, who understand that human rights are protected through more than private conviction. They are protected when ordinary people decide that another person’s freedom is worth the disruption of their own comfort.

The question is no longer whether we consider ourselves allies. The question is what our allyship opens.

Whose voice becomes harder to silence because we are standing beside them?

Whose freedom becomes more possible because we have placed our influence, our resources, and our bodies in the struggle?

And when someone is being pushed from the streetcar, removed from their workplace, seized from their neighborhood, erased from public life, or denied the right to exist freely and fully, will we plant our feet beside them and refuse to move?

When freedom comes knocking at our door, will we answer?

The Home Demonstration program was never intended to save lives, but during the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918, it certainly did.

When most of us think of the flu, we think of an irritating illness that weakens us and keeps us in bed for a few days.

But in 1918, influenza killed an estimated 675,000 people in the United States alone. The death toll would almost certainly have been higher without the work of women in the Home Demonstration program.

The program had been created to teach farm women skills such as canning, food conservation, nutrition, and household management during the war. Nursing a nation through a deadly pandemic was not on their bingo card.

But local Home Demonstration agencies quickly shifted gears, transforming diet kitchens into community food centers and social club members into volunteer nurses.

Trained nurses were scarce. Women who had never studied medicine suddenly found themselves in sickrooms across the state, doing whatever the moment required.

Helen Simmons, a Home Demonstration agent in Durham County, North Carolina, wrote to the central office with an account of her days:

Ms. Simmons reported going as far and as fast as she could, from Sunday morning until Saturday night, trying to reach every case of influenza in the countryside.

When I first read her account, I wondered where the federal agencies were to provide ongoing support.

Then I remembered that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not yet exist. The agency would not be founded until 1946, nearly three decades later.

In 1918, federal oversight fell primarily to the United States Public Health Service, which issued guidance and worked with state and local health departments. There was no centralized federal disease control agency like the one we depend upon today.

The response was overwhelmingly local and voluntary. City health departments, the Red Cross, community organizations, and volunteer nursing networks carried much of the actual weight of the crisis because no coordinated national infrastructure existed to do it for them.

Black women entered Black communities to provide the same essential care as their white counterparts. Health care was segregated, and so were many of the critical safety nets communities relied upon.

North Carolina’s 1918 Extension Service report later stated that women may have rendered a greater service to the state during the epidemic than in any other way because of the urgent need for feeding, nursing, and medical attention.

The soup kitchens they built saved hundreds of lives.

And yet, we rarely hear about the countless women in local communities who cared for those who were sick and dying during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

When I went looking for their stories, I discovered that one of the primary reasons we know anything about them is that the Home Demonstration agents documented their work in reports.

Those reports preserved what public memory did not: women traveling from house to house, feeding families, cleaning sickrooms, taking temperatures, administering medicine, comforting children, and preparing bodies for burial.

Their names may not appear in most histories of the pandemic, but their labor is woven throughout the story of who survived the 1918 influenza pandemic.

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So why does all of this matter now?

Because we are once again living through a public health crisis whose full dimensions are still emerging.

Thousands of people across more than thirty states have become ill with cyclosporiasis, an intestinal infection caused by the Cyclospora parasite.

Investigators are examining lettuce and salad greens as possible sources, but tracing the outbreak has been complicated by reductions in the food-borne illness surveillance programs created to help public health officials identify patterns before thousands of people become sick.

In 1918, there was no CDC to coordinate a national response.

Today, we have the knowledge, technology, trained professionals, and public institutions earlier generations lacked.

Weakening those institutions is a choice.

What has not changed is who fills the gaps.

Nurses, local health departments, community organizations, caregivers, and neighbors still notice who is sick. They prepare food. They check temperatures. They call on families. They carry information to the entire community as stability in a time of health crisis.

They do what the moment requires, often without recognition and long after public attention has moved elsewhere.

This is Moral Feminist Witness: the work of sustaining life and community, undertaken faithfully and documented truthfully.

Moral Feminist Witness ensures that in moments of crisis, women are there to stand in the gap and provide care and healing stability for the entire community while advocating for a more just system to be reinstated and/or funded.

We should recognize the people doing that work while they are still among us. We should learn their names, record their stories, and provide them with the resources, staffing, protection, and compensation their work deserves.

And we must refuse the idea that their courage makes strong public institutions unnecessary.

Helen Simmons and the women of the Home Demonstration program stepped into the breach because no adequate national public health system existed.

More than a century later, nurses and neighbors should not have to step into the same breach because we chose to dismantle the system generations of women helped teach us how to build.

Care may begin with the person who shows up at the door.

Justice requires that she not be left standing there alone.

These were the last words of Mr. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

They are killing me.

The killing of Mr. Salgado Araujo has haunted me since I first heard about his July 7 death in Magnolia Park, in Houston’s East End.

Perhaps because we both moved to the Houston area decades ago in pursuit of our own happiness. Perhaps because his words sound hauntingly similar to the final words of another Houston resident, George Floyd, as a Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee against his neck.

Or perhaps because my humanity will not allow me to separate these words from the violence being perpetrated on American streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

This time, it happened in Magnolia Park, an East End neighborhood known for families, gardens, delicious food, and the labor that has quite literally built our city house by house.

Mr. Salgado Araujo built more than houses.

For 35 years, he told his sons, “Échale ganas.” Give it your all.

And they did.

Ronaldo graduated from the University of Houston. Lorenzo Jr. earned a scholarship to Tufts University and became a mechanical engineer. His youngest son is studying engineering now.

Three American citizens raised by a father who worked from sunrise to sunset so his children could sit in classrooms he never had the opportunity to enter.

Now, they are sharing their grief publicly because of the inhumane way their father died.

How should we respond to Mr. Salgado Araujo’s killing and the detention of the men who witnessed it?

The world’s great religious traditions are clear about how we are to live in relationship with immigrants: we welcome them as our neighbors.

Nowhere in our sacred texts are we instructed to determine the worth of our neighbors according to their citizenship. In fact, the Hebrew scriptures go out of their way to explicitly command care for the immigrant.

Leviticus 19:33–34 is strikingly clear:

The passage does more than tell the Israelites how to treat immigrants living among them. It calls them back to the time when they themselves were immigrants in Egypt.

The word translated here as alien is one I loathe because it has been weaponized as a pejorative against immigrants and people presumed to be “not like us.” It is the same dehumanizing language ICE used when it described Mr. Salgado Araujo as an “illegal alien.”

The Hebrew word is ger: a sojourner, someone dwelling among a people not their own by birth.

Ger does not erase a person’s humanity. It names a relationship and, more importantly, the community’s covenantal responsibility to that person.

From that definition, I am also a ger in Houston, in my own small way. Twenty-three years after arriving, people still remind me that I am not a native Texan, as though the land itself keeps a ledger.

But that is where my comparison ends.

I have received a hospitality that Mr. Salgado Araujo was denied because I am an American citizen and because my presence is rarely treated as suspicious.

And yet, for decades, Mr. Salgado Araujo and I sojourned in the same city, working in our different ways to make Houston a better and more just place. Leviticus reminds us that we belonged to one another.

Leviticus may seem like an odd book to quote in modern times. Yet, when we listen closely, it speaks with startling clarity about how we are to live in covenant with the Divine and with one another.

My seminary professor, Dr. Sam Balentine, taught that the detail and repetition throughout Leviticus reflect how seriously the Divine takes covenant with humanity.

Covenant connects the Divine with humanity on our best and worst days. And as God seeks covenant with humanity, we are instructed to live in covenant with our neighbors, even and especially the immigrant.

These instructions encompass every person who comprises a community, especially those whose power has been diminished: the child, the widow, and the sojourner from another land.

Our sacred texts are clear about whom we are to welcome and how we are to treat them. So why have so many faith communities remained silent in response to the killing of Mr. Salgado Araujo, Alex Pretti, and Renée Good, who was killed almost six months to the day before him?

What does covenant require when the government itself becomes the one oppressing our neighbors?

Leviticus speaks to a people who had once been enslaved by an empire and commands them never to become that empire for someone else.

The command to love the sojourner means holding our own government accountable when its agents take a life. The command does not expire because the person violating it wears a badge instead of Pharaoh’s crown.

Me están matando. They are killing me.

If we take seriously our faith in God our Creator, then our churches and temples, mosques and sanctuaries must ring out with support for our sojourning neighbors.

Religious leaders and communities must leverage our access, our institutions, our pulpits, our money, and our public standing.

• We must demand an independent investigation into Mr. Salgado Araujo’s death.

• We must demand accountability.

• We must stand beside immigrant families facing detention and separation.

• We must refuse language that reduces sacred human beings to a legal status.

Silence is not neutrality when our neighbors are being hunted, detained, and killed. Silence places us on the side of Pharaoh.

Me están matando.

Mr. Salgado Araujo’s final words are now entrusted to us.

May they ring from every pulpit and sanctuary until justice comes.

They are killing our neighbor.

Covenant requires us to answer with just action.

This is part of the series: Women Who Built Community Through Crisis ~ You Are Not Alone to commemorate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s democracy.

Houston, we have a problem.

I have held this phrase in my spirit for the past year as ICE agents have aggressively detained immigrants in cities across our nation.

As our neighbors in Minneapolis, Charlotte, and Chicago have stood up against ICE overreach, many of us in Houston have remained relatively quiet. Even though the same overreach has been happening here.

But on Tuesday, July 7, many of us outside Houston’s immigrant communities were forced awake by the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican man and longtime Houston resident who was on his way to work, picking up workers for a day of construction in the Houston heat.

An ICE officer shot him near Canal Street in Houston’s East End. By that afternoon, his son stood at a podium asking the question no family should ever have to ask in public: Why?

What moves a community from silence to action?

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The Grandmas of the American Indian Movement knew something about that question.

In February 1973, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a room full of people faced their own version of communal hesitation.

Tribal chairman Richard Wilson had been terrorizing his own people for months. Chiefs and organizers gathered at Calico Hall again and again to decide what to do. And still, nothing happened.

Then Ellen Moves Camp stood up.

She looked at the men in that room and asked them plainly what they intended to do about this abuse of power against their own people.

One person later remembered the moment this way: the decision to take Wounded Knee came when Ellen Moves Camp pointed at the men and asked what they were going to do about it. Without the women, he said, they would still be meeting at Calico.

The occupation of Wounded Knee began soon after, a deliberate return to the site of the 1890 massacre.

About 200 people occupied federal ground for 71 days because elder women refused to let the silence continue.

Ms. Moves Camp kept working once the occupation began.

She helped run the daily life of the camp. She coordinated food across four kitchens so no one went hungry during a siege. She greeted strangers who arrived to help and put them to work. She helped deliver a baby born in the middle of a firefight.

Leadership, for the Grandmas of the American Indian Movement, was never separated from care and action. It was the same act, worn two different ways.

Ellen Moves Camp, Gladys Bissonette, Agnes Lamont, and the women who stood beside them came to be known as the Grandmas of the American Indian Movement. It was a title earned through decades of watching, tending, organizing, and speaking when speaking cost something real.

We need that kind of elder moral leadership now.

We need grandmothers and abuelas, aunties and elders, mothers and mentors, clergy and neighbors who are willing to stand against ICE overreach in Houston and in every local community where fear has been made public policy.

Authority often looks like a woman who has already buried enough people, survived enough cruelty, and told enough truth that she is no longer afraid to name what everyone else is avoiding.

That kind of leadership moves.

It carried a nation’s worth of grief into 71 days of resistance that the powerful could not ignore.

Houston needs that same action now.

We need elders in our own circles willing to stand in the rooms of power and demand action out loud.

This is what Moral Feminist Witness does.

It names the silence and demands action.

Ellen Moves Camp made the room ready herself.

This week, find the elder in your family, your congregation, or your neighborhood who has already said the hard thing out loud.

Go stand next to them.

And if you are the elder who has been waiting to speak, we need you to speak now!

Yesterday, I worshipped.

Not in a traditional sanctuary but the sanctuary of a park, where hundreds of neighbors gathered to enjoy the July 4th festivities.

I have been to plenty of Independence day fireworks in my lifetime, but this one was different.

Perhaps because my husband and I are travelling and we weren’t in Texas, where the climate is currently a bit more hostile.

Or perhaps because I had my guard up and dared anyone to pick a political fight of good vs. evil (as I wore my Nevertheless She Persisted t-shirt as my shot of courage).

Either way. I was pleasantly surprised.

We arrived early with our dogs and spread out our blanket.

We munched on watermelon and chips as we enjoyed a bit of people watching. And there were lots of different types of people to watch!

Young and old. Families throwing the ball and single adults reading by themselves on a blanket. Couples and children with bubble-making toys.

And food. My goodness was there food! Food from the nearby food trucks and tables of goodies the families brought showing this was clearly not their first July 4 rodeo!

But most of all it was the salad bowl of cultures.

Korean and Indian mixed with Italian and Spanish speaking; African American and Russian mixed with Caucasian and Middle Eastern.

There was no animosity. We were all enjoying shared space with music, joy, and ease.

We absorbed the sacred text within us as we interacted with one another.

“You have worth,” is what I received from the smiles of neighbors.

“The light within me honors the light within you. Blessings.” is what I sought to convey to those who passed by my blanket.

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Our dogs sniffed one another as their humans talked to one another.

Children expressed their contained joy with exuberance.

And adults gave themselves permission to lie down upon the sacred earth and rest a while (especially when the internet slowed down).

We participated in the holy music of laughter, conversations in languages beyond our own, and silence on our own blankets.

The day was far from perfect but even as we encountered challenges, we adjusted.

Some moved their blankets to another spot, some accommodate others, and some understood that our pesky disturbances are temporal.

The day transformed into night, and we settled in for the fireworks of lights, sounds, and color.

As I held my shaking dog close to my chest to comfort him, I wondered who among us needs to be comforted from the skies of our democracy exploding before our eyes.

Beauty and awe, thunderous presence and joy. All can be true at the same time in our worship of community together.

Even as we walked back to our cars, there was a shared sense of patience and understanding that we all want to go home even as we wait a little longer than we desire.

Yesterday, I worshipped in the communion of my neighbors, nourishing me on the bread of life and cup of unending compassion so that we can return to the challenges of our democracy and lives.

How will you celebrate beyond the hot dogs and sparklers?

And even more than that, who gets to celebrate our complicated, unfinished project of democracy?

The people whose names fill the history books? The people who have been banned from the history books, or never made it in the first place?

This week, we continue our series on women who built community through crisis by focusing on Japanese American women, who held their community together while the democracy they belonged to imprisoned them.

In the spring of 1942, more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from their homes and their livelihoods.

They were sent first to converted racetracks and fairgrounds, sleeping in horse stalls, surrounded by barbed wire.

Then to concentration camps* scattered across the American interior, people whose only crime was their ancestry.

The government called them relocation centers. The people inside them knew what they were.

They were American citizens: Workers, parents, teachers, farmers, neighbors. They did nothing wrong.

Their government imprisoned them anyway.

Here is what the history books do not always tell us. The women built community.

In the barrenness of barracks shared by four and five families with thin walls and no privacy, women created the rhythms of ordinary life.

They organized schools for their children. They published newspapers so the community could speak to itself.

They planted gardens in soil that had no business growing anything.

They organized cultural gatherings and holiday celebrations and the small, daily, irreplaceable acts of care that hold people together when everything else has been stripped away.

They celebrated as their form of resistance.

And they fought back legally.

Mitsuye Endo was 22 years old when her government fired her as a clerical employee for the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the California State Personnel Board terminated all Japanese American state employees.

Attorney James C. Purcell was looking for a plaintiff for a habeas corpus petition challenging the incarceration. He chose Endo in part because she was Methodist, had a brother serving in the U.S. Army, and had never been to Japan.

He sent a representative to ask if she would be willing. She was hesitant. She agreed. As she said years later: “I agreed to do it at that moment, because they said it’s for the good of everybody, and so I said, well if that’s it, I’ll go ahead and do it.”

The War Relocation Authority offered her release. All she had to do was agree not to return to the West Coast. She refused.

She stayed imprisoned while her case moved through the federal courts.

She waited with her community while the government delayed and the wheels of justice turned with the particular slowness they reserve for the people who need them most.

On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in her favor.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “We are of the view that Mitsuye Endo should be given her liberty.”

The day before the ruling was issued, the Roosevelt administration, having been alerted to the impending decision, announced that Japanese Americans could begin returning to the West Coast in January 1945.

One woman. One refusal. Thousands of people came home.

This is what a Moral Feminist Witness does. Women offering stability to her community while fighting like hell to demand justice immediately.

And all the while there is a tone of celebration as resistance that no governmental power has control over the essence of their personhood and community.

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This July 4th weekend, we are watching history repeat itself with a clarity that should stop us cold.

The current administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same wartime law that undergirded the incarceration of Japanese Americans, to detain and deport immigrants without due process.

According to the American Immigration Council, 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention on record. The number of people with no criminal record held in detention increased by 2,450 percent.

Recently, there are reports that ICE has detained more than 10,000 people in cities all over the country.

And in this moment of existential crisis for our democracy, there are countless women organizing, creating stability for the most vulnerable, and fighting like hell for their loved ones to be returned.

Happy Independence day?

Who gets to celebrate?

What if our July 4th celebrations embodied the celebration-as-resistance energy like our Japanese American foremothers?

These are the questions I will be holding as I honor our unfinished project of democracy as a Moral Feminist Witness.

*A note on language: Throughout this piece I use the terms “concentration camps” and “incarceration.” This reflects the preferred language of Japanese American scholars and community organizations, including Densho. President Roosevelt himself used the phrase “concentration camps” to describe these facilities. Two-thirds of those imprisoned were American citizens. Words carry the weight of what actually happened.

I love Pride parades!

I love the color, the celebration, and most of all, I love the radical hospitality.

For those who have been rejected by family and loved ones, the LGBTQIA+ community goes out of their way to ensure that every person feels welcomed and loved! Woohoo!

My faith tradition has a saying, “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”

I have watched this saying embodied at every Pride parade I have ever attended.

Even in years when the surrounding culture has been hostile, even in cities where the local political climate has turned cold toward LGBTQIA+ people, Pride parades have remained joyful expressions of love and identity.

I learned that lesson in the 1990s, when I started attending Pride in Washington, D.C.

The AIDS epidemic was a frightening, grief-soaked time.

But when the music started and the bold colors began moving through Dupont Circle, something shifted.

For a few hours, the community channeled a determined joy.

LGBTQIA+ people celebrated the beauty of who God created them to be, and those of us who came as allies were fully welcomed and invited into that joy.

And then, the next day, the LGBTQIA+ community and their allies went back out to keep fighting for queer human rights.

Our celebration is what fueled our fight for justice.

Years later, my sister and her children were visiting Houston, and I invited them to my city’s Pride Festival.

My thirteen-year-old niece painted her face with sparkles and wore a rainbow skirt.

When we arrived, the crowd welcomed her with open arms. She danced. My nephew ate cotton candy.

They both were told, in word and in action, that they were welcomed, seen and valued exactly as the wonderful young people they were!

That is what I love most about Pride - the radical hospitality of everyone who shows up.

I can think of no better scripture for this season than Jesus’s words in the gospel of Matthew 10:40-42, because the whole passage is describing radical hospitality.

The text sits at the close of Jesus’s instructions to his disciples before he sends them out to share the good news in neighboring communities.

Earlier in the chapter, he tells them what to carry and what to leave behind, so they can fully receive the hospitality of the people who host them.

He also prepares them for the opposite: when hospitality is not extended, shake the dust off your feet and move on.

Then he closes the instructions with a string of people that are included in this hospitality, each one widening the circle:

• Whoever welcomes you…

• Whoever welcomes me…

• Whoever welcomes a prophet…

• Whoever welcomes a righteous person…

• Whoever gives even a cup of cold water...

Together, these sayings describe a mutual hospitality that the disciples will need on both ends, as people who give welcome and as people who receive it.

Womanist theologian Dr. Emilie Townes warns against flattening this kind of hospitality into something superficial, a nice gesture rather than a costly spiritual practice.

The movement of these sayings backs her up. Jesus is not describing a single, simple act. He is describing a widening, dynamic, and justice-demanding hospitality.

To welcome another person is to celebrate their presence.

To welcome a prophet is to speak truth to power.

To welcome a righteous person, and to give them a cup of water, is to meet a real need and to serve them.

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The Greek word translated “righteous” in this passage is dikaios. Its root is dikē, the Greek word for justice.

These meanings are interchangeable and transform Jesus’ teaching even more. Whoever welcomes the one advocating for justice through actions is expressing radical hospitality.

Thus radical hospitality requires – celebration, truth-telling, and justice action.

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera give us a model for what radical hospitality looks like.

Ms. Johnson, a Black trans woman, and Ms. Rivera, a Puerto Rican trans woman, were both present at the 1969 Stonewall uprising and remained a fixture of New York’s gay liberation movement afterward.

Together they celebrated their community openly and without apology.

And then they told the truth to the political powers of New York City demanding their rights.

Finally they put justice into action when they founded a NYC shelter for young trans people, who had been shunned by their own families.

For Ms. Johnson and Ms. Rivera, celebration, truth-telling, and justice in action were all movements of their radical hospitality for the queer community.

Isn’t that what Pride is supposed to be about today even as Pride month ends?

• The radical hospitality of celebrating people created in God’s image, in all the diversity of that image.

• The radical hospitality of telling truth to power when state legislatures move to strip rights from trans families.

• The radical hospitality of standing actively for justice with LGBTQIA+ families while political and legal efforts continue to test the security of marriage equality.

If we are people of faith, we must practice radical hospitality inside a society that keeps writing inhospitable and unjust laws.

Celebration. Truth-telling. Acts of justice.

Right now, in Houston, where I live, radical hospitality is critical for those created in God’s Trans image.

I have deep respect for my Trans siblings here, because this city is not always an easy place for them to live as God made them.

Gender-affirming care is being denied to young people.

Schools, which should be places of safety, have become sites of danger for some kids.

Organizations doing the daily work of radical hospitality, matter enormously right now, and so do faith communities willing to share that work alongside them.

And Houston is not only a hard place to live as a Trans person. It has also been a dangerous one, especially for Trans women of color.

In the past few years, at least three trans women have been killed here, and those are only the names that have been reported and recognized.

Diamond Brigman, 36, a Black Trans woman, was killed on March 16, 2024.

Vanity Williams, 34, a Black Trans woman, was killed on August 3, 2024.

Persia Amarra Conway, 33, a trans woman, was found dead near Brays Bayou on May 25, 2026.

Each of them was created in God’s image. Each of their deaths belongs to a documented pattern, not an isolated tragedy. Texas has long been a dangerous place for Trans women of color, and too often the people doing the work of remembering, organizing vigils, demanding answers, and insisting on dignity are Trans people themselves.

Who is offering them radical hospitality, in their lives and in their deaths?

Sharing and receiving radical hospitality with the Trans community is vitally important right now.

But it will not be easy. Jesus warned his disciples of that too.

There will be people and places that will not welcome this kind of radical hospitality of celebration, truth-telling, and acts of justice.

We must remember to shake the dust off our feet and move on, still carrying the work with us.

So this is the charge as Pride Month closes.

Celebration, truth-telling, and acts of justice with the Trans community through this inhospitable and unjust society in which we live.

This is our spiritual practice. Now and always!