Content Warning: This blog contains references to child abuse.Peace for cities is when everything works for everybody all the time, and no one is left out. Peace is God’s goal for our cities.H.P. SpeesOver ten years ago, I started the journey of becoming an ordained pastor. I read Pastor: The [...]Read More
Communal Mental Health and Healing: What We Can Learn From Spiderwebs
When I think of communal mental health, I think of how our individual mental health impacts and is impacted by the mental health of others. I see it almost like a spiderweb, with spider silk that interconnects each of us to each other. It is sticky and strong, attracting and catching not only other [...]Read More
What’s up With the Scars on Jesus’ Resurrected Body?
Jesus does a good job at turning our perspectives upside down, doesn’t He? In the Beatitudes, found in Matthew 5, Jesus says we are blessed if we do things like be poor in spirit, mourn, be merciful, and the like. Throughout the telling of the Good News, Jesus continued to shake up conventional [...]Read More
Faith in the Face of Separation: The Resilience of Mothers Apart
In the tapestry of human experiences, few threads are as poignant and complex as those of women who find themselves separated from their children. Whether due to the ravages of war and persecution, the shadows of mental health struggles, the bars of incarceration, or other heart-breaking [...]Read More
Restoring Community Belonging
Those Leaving Prison and Those In Churches Need Each Other To HealPrison reentry efforts can too often—unintentionally—keep men and women returning from prison isolated from the rest of their communities. With specialized reentry nonprofits, paid staff, transitional housing, and other important [...]Read More
Justice Through Healing
Equal Justice USA today is a much different organization than it was more than 20 years ago at our founding. Then we were focused sharply on ending the death penalty through state campaigns, and we’ve succeeded on that front. As important as those wins are, what we learned from those campaigns [...]Read More
Medicina on the Move
On Friday March 18, 2022, the CCDA Southwest Border Local Network, familia and community convened at the Tijuana-San Diego border to walk and talk through how God’s healing work has continually flowed even in the midst of a pandemic. The event's theme was, Rivers of Living Water: God's Healing Work [...]Read More