Mourning in New Mexico, Some Justice for Breonna Taylor, Remembering Nichelle Nichols
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hi everyone,
Sy’s back! Until his wife goes back to work, that is, and he’ll be taking another, longer parental break.
We hope this message finds you in a posture to receive God’s love and joy in the midst of all that is happening around you. You are loved. And it is out of that well of love, grace, and truth that we step out into the world. Here are this week’s resources to help you engage, intercede, and work towards leaving colonized faith.
Sy’s recommendations:
Earlier this week, authorities in New Mexico arrested and indicted a man they believe is responsible for the killing of four Muslim men over the last several months in Albuquerque. The city’s Muslim community has been on edge, fearful that the uptick in attacks were a targeted effort to terrorize them. Now that prosecutors believe it was a Muslim man who committed the killings, possibly motivated by intrareligious conflict, we might be tempted to think the tragedy is, at the very least, not tinged with islamophobia. But that would be missing the forest for the trees. In the US, Christians, or white people, or any dominant group do not spend weeks in fear because several murder victims in a community share their identity. The fear the Muslim community in Albuquerque felt is itself the result of the oppression which makes that fear reasonable. Let us mourn with them, both over the loss of life and over the country that engenders their anxiety.
Line in the Land is a podcast from Texas Public Radio and the Houston Chronicle that premiered this past spring. It’s first season is a five-part series on the journey of the 16,000 Haitian migrants who ended up outside of Del Rio, Texas in the fall of 2021, prompting controversy and massive news coverage. It’s a fascinating and humanizing story with far more depth than the media covering the events in 2021 could ever have provided. The reporters follow Haitians from their homeland throughout South and Central America, all the way up to the US. Along the way, they discuss the high-level forces of history and international policy that shaped both the Haitians’ travails and Haiti’s place in the world today. The episode’s aren’t too long, and you will learn a ton. You can listen to the series in both English and Spanish here.
Suzie’s recommendations:
Nichelle Nichols wasn’t just a pioneer on the Starship Enterprise in outer space. She was also an activist and the first Black woman to play a significant, non-servile role on prime-time television. She and William Shatner were also responsible for the first interracial kiss on American TV. The kiss aired just one year after Loving v. Virginia, which ruled that interracial marriage bans were unconstitutional. The story behind that and other fascinating and inspiring aspects of Nichols’ life are included in this article written in honor of her recent passing.
On March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor was shot to death by police officers while sleeping in her own bed. The officers invaded her home with a no-knock warrant for the arrest of her ex-boyfriend, who was not present at the time. For over two years, outraged citizens and activists have been calling for accountability for her shooters, and last week they finally got some good news. Federal prosecutors indicted four officers following an investigation which led the government to believe that the officers falsified the information they used to obtain the warrant. In a previous newsletter, I referenced an investigative piece by the Washington Post exposing the rise in the use of no-knock warrants in the US, the minimal scrutiny of their use, and the subsequent deadly effects. The tragedy of Breonna Taylor’s killing is a textbook case of that negligence. It further highlights the disproportionate toll that police brutality has on Black women, who the system often casts aside as collateral damage rather than seeing them as victims worthy of justice.
Jonathan’s recommendations:
In past newsletters, we talked quite a bit about the Catholic Church’s atrocities committed against first nations peoples. This 2021 article from the Globe and Mail reports that $1 of every $20 donated in Canada went to the Catholic Church. Yet lack of funds was the Church’s consistently cited reason that financial compensation was so low for those whom it abused and stripped of cultural heritage, and whose children it killed. Plainly, the Church takes in hundreds of millions per year and holds billions in assets. But it pledged only $54 million in reparations as part of a settlement in 2006, and it only ever came up with $3.7 million of the additional $25 million it pledged to raise. If we are to leave colonized faith, the stories of Zacchaeus and Matthew who exploited others, met Jesus, and repaid their ill-gotten gains should be our models for how we respond to injustice.
Ann Fessler wrote the book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. In an interview with Slate’s What Next podcast, she asserts that adoption is not the quick fix to our cultural struggle with abortion that churches, supreme court justices, and crisis counselors make it out to be. As we seek to center marginalized voices, it would be helpful to listen to adoptees like Fessler and mothers who had to hand their babies to someone else. This podcast is an explicit invitation out of the pro-life-versus-pro-choice binary way of thinking and acting. Hopefully, it will help us love the most vulnerable well.
Shake the Dust Preview
Tomorrow, we’re talking with Kai Ngu, co-founder of Church Clarity and a divinity student studying colonial and missionary historical engagement with indigenous religious traditions. We discuss their personal story of how their views changed on sexuality and theology over time, finding empathy and a way forward with family who vehemently reject their new views, what they’re learning about how Christian colonialism treated indigenous notions of gender and spirituality, and a whole lot more.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
The KTF team