KTF Weekly Newsletter: the Center of the World, Hypocrisy on Refugees, Forgive Us for Being Women
September 16, 2021
Hi everyone,
This will, ever so sadly, be Suzie’s last week on the newsletter for a while. She is about to take a break from KTF work because of the quickly-approaching, new baby. So please take a moment to celebrate all her incredible work with us and pray all the best for her and her growing family! Expect to see more recommendations than usual from Sy and Jonathan for a little bit, and perhaps some guest contributors as well.
Alright, onward to this week’s resources…
Jonathan’s recommendations:
My resources this week challenged me to take off the filters through which I viewed the “War on Terror” and attempt to see a people divorced from their stereotypes and portrayals. The history of Afghanistan is much deeper and more beautifully complex than our social media posts and newscasts over the last two decades have explained. And part of decolonizing our faith is engaging with that history and context in its fullness as best we can before Afghanistan’s reality invaded ours on 9/11. NPR’s Throughline released, “Afghanistan: The Center of the World” and it truly is a much better introduction to the breadth and depth of a part of what we in the West deemed the Middle East.
In addition to that, it must not be lost on us the impact that the “War on Terror” had on the lives of Muslims living in the United States and those living in the 19 countries America has attacked since 9/11. The Daily podcast from the New York Times featured a whistleblower that was sent to prison on treason charges for exposing the racist, Islamophobic policies in the Minnesota office of the FBI as they terrorized the local Somali population. And Vox’s Today, Explained covered Brown University’s report that calculates the cost of the War on Terror, tallying 900,000 lives lost and $8 Trillion, while cautioning that these are low estimates.
Suzie’s recommendations:
In an era of virtue signaling, it’s easy to get away with saying the right things without putting the values we espouse into action. Practicing what we preach must include critically examining the policies that define our neighborhoods and cities and playing a prophetic role in reshaping what is not in line with the rule and reign of Christ. Along those lines, this recent Atlantic article does a good job of calling out the hypocrisy of progressive communities that claim to welcome refugees while failing to address the real challenges that refugees face upon arrival— like a lack of affordable housing. As the authors, Darrell Owens and Muhammad T. Alameldin, rightly state, “housing affordability is refugee policy.”
As our nation commemorates and collectively mourns the twenty-year anniversary of 9/11, it’s important to equally lament, as Jonathan notes above, the tragic legacy of this event’s impact on Muslims across the world. On US soil, Muslim communities that quietly existed prior to the fall of the Twin Towers are, to this day, viewed with suspicion and fear by the US government, law enforcement, and their neighbors; and are targeted for surveillance and hate crimes. The New York Times piece “To Be Young, American and Muslim After 9/11” delves into some of the complexity of how this violent backlash has shaped the lives of young Muslims coming of age in the post-9/11 era. It puts faces to the discrimination and stigmatization of which our nation needs to repent.
Sy’s recommendations:
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has published several thorough, well-documented reports over the last decade or so surveying various forms of racism in American history and the criminal justice system. These reports are incredibly valuable resources for educating ourselves and others. The most recent report is on racial bias in jury selection, a practice first outlawed about 150 years ago in the United States, but which persists to this day. It is right in EJI’s wheelhouse to tell this story of racism adapting, growing more and more subtle as it becomes less and less socially acceptable. Check it out, and browse all of EJI’s past reports here.
My second recommendation this week is a post on Patheos by Joy Qualls, a communications professor at Biola university, discussing the role of women in the American Pentecostal tradition. She begins in her small Assemblies of God congregation, founded by a prolific female church planter in my birth state of North Dakota. She discusses how the rhetoric of broader American and Evangelical culture, along with Pentecostals’ desire not to be seen as “the religious movement from the other side of the tracks,” drew the Pentecostal church away from its highly affirming stances toward women. The post is also a preview of Qualls’ new book, which has the rather eye-catching title, God Forgive Us for Being Women.
Shake the Dust preview
Tomorrow is the season finale of Shake the Dust! We take questions from listeners and discuss the difficulty of maintaining faith when the Church can be so awful, the role of empathy in leaving colonized faith, interracial family dynamics, why we don’t cover more current events on the show, how we did this season in achieving our goals, and a lot more. Don’t miss this one, even though you all, as subscribers, will still be getting monthly episodes between seasons. If you haven’t yet, go to one of our bonus episodes on your phone, like this one, and click the “listen in podcast app” link to set up your private podcast feed in your app of choice that has all of our regular and bonus episodes.
Thanks so much for reading, and we’ll see you next week!
The KTF Team