KTF Weekly Newsletter: Haitian Asylum, Café with Comadres, We Will Not Forgive
Hi everyone,
Because we’ll be doing monthly Shake the Dust episodes during the off-season period for just you all, our beloved subscribers, we want to know if there is anything you want to hear us discuss or something from the season on which you’d like us to expand. You can reply to this email with any thoughts or suggestions. We would love to hear from you!
Alright, here is our first set of recommendations sans Suzie (*single tear*).
Sy’s recommendations:
It is devastating that Haiti is back in the news this week after the recent earthquake and political destabilization following the assassination of its president. More devastating is that the suffering now being inflicted is entirely unforced, and President Biden’s fault. Many have seen the reports this week of Haitian asylum seekers at the border living in inhumane conditions in a camp under a bridge on the Texas-Mexico border. Under a Trump era policy (which a court ruled unlawful just last week), the Biden administration began rapidly deporting people before they could seek asylum. However, the Court order stopping the deportation flights won’t take effect until next week, and the Biden administration is appealing. In the meantime, they’re rushing as many Haitians out of the country as possible. Today, the State Department’s Special Envoy to Haiti, appointed in July after the assassination, resigned in protest. You can read his scathing resignation letter, which echoes many Haitians’ criticisms of US policy toward Haiti, here. A number of organizations focused on Haiti and its diaspora published a statement detailing the absurdity and cruelty of the administration’s actions, and puts those actions in the historical context of the US immigration system’s particular anti-Black disdain for Haitians. There is an interfaith group of religious leaders that has written a letter to the administration opposing these actions, and they are collecting signatures until this upcoming Monday. Read it here and consider signing if you fall into the category of “religious leader.”
On a very different note: As we’ve talked about a few different times both here and on the podcast, the ability to alter our imagination and the subconscious ways we frame the world around us is a key to leaving colonized faith. To that end, I’m always interested in stories that reshape familiar kinds of narratives, which is why I picked up The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. It’s a novel in the style of a Western with some magical realism and a sprinkling of other genres included, but it focuses on a Chinese assassin on a quest for revenge against the men who stopped his marriage to a white woman and forced him into servitude with the Central Pacific Railroad. The author, Tom Lin, writes beautifully as he incorporates, exaggerates, and subverts many western tropes throughout the story. If you want a good preview of the book and a discussion of why Lin engaged in this project, check out this New York Times piece on the book and a few others like it. If you’re considering reading the book, then I’ll just give this content warning now for violence, language, and some brief sexual content, to a degree one might expect in a Western.
Since I know you all will be needing — nay, yearning — for quality podcast content after the season finale of Shake the Dust, I have a new one to recommend that just launched. It’s called Café with Comadres. It’s an insightful and nuanced series of discussions on faith and culture from the perspective of three Latina Christians who have been doing ministry and activism for years. Two of the three hosts are people whose work I have followed for a while: Sojourners’ Sandy Ovalle Martínez and Karen González from World Relief. The third host, Jennifer Guerra Aldana, works in multicultural initiatives at Fuller Seminary’s Fuller Youth Institute. The first season will be 12 episodes long, and the episodes are about 30 minutes, so it will be an easy and quite informative listen. The first two published episodes have already delved into the complexity of Latinx cultures and political beliefs, solidarity with Black people and other marginalized groups, colorism, and more.
Jonathan’s recommendations:
On Sunday, Slate’s What Next podcast dove deep into the religious resistance to, and the religious exemption from, the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate. The episode, “God Doesn’t Want Me Vaccinated” highlights the brackish waters where political ideology and supposed Christian witness mix beyond distinction. Journalists Mary Harris and Ruth Graham’s pointed discussion in this episode drives home the reality that the deinstitutionalization of religion has made engagement with the ideas of what faith is and who the faithful are very difficult. As the pandemic is now claiming 2000 lives a day in the United States alone, followers of Jesus must press for fidelity to the Christ of Scripture, and resist the sanctification of political ideology, with love, grace, and truth. You can listen to the episode here, or read the transcript here.
Reverend Esau McCaulley, who penned the critically acclaimed book Reading While Black (a previous recommendation of mine), called out President Biden’s anti-Christian narrative of revenge and violence in the wake of a bombing at the Kabul airport that claimed the lives of 14 US soldiers and scores of Afghans. “The Dangerous Politics of ‘We Will Not Forgive'” in the New York Times repeats Christ’s command to meet violence with radical love and forgiveness in a divine refusal to kill our enemies. Moreover, McCaulley shines a light on the hypocrisy in this country, which regularly asks Black and Brown communities in the midst of rampant police brutality to forgive and forget before loved ones are even buried. He asks, “Why isn’t the same restraint called for in the context of international incidents?” Violence will never be a fruit of the Spirit, and we must press into being peacemakers at every level — including geopolitically.
Related, Biden’s desire to make someone pay led directly to the deaths of 7 children and 3 adults who had nothing to do with the bombing at Kabul Airport. One of the victims of that attack, Zamarai Ahmadi , was not an Islamic State member, as the Pentagon first insisted, but an aid worker serving the poorest and most vulnerable people in Afghanistan. Sadly, as comedian and writer Trevor Noah pointed out, this is not new, reparations are not likely, and consequences for the strike will be minimal if there are any repercussions at all. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and missiles fired from drones driven by revenge do not make peace.
Remember to send in any discussion topics you might want to hear about on our bonus Shake the Dust episodes! Thanks so much for reading, and we’ll see you next week!
Two thirds of the KTF team