All posts filed under: Current Affairs

Statement from the Center for Reconciliation

May 30, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Reconciliation

The Center for Reconciliation celebrates the lives of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in all their fullness, beauty,  and complexity, along with all those murdered by white supremacy. We deeply grieve their loss, and we deeply grieve the insidious  persistence of racism and racial violence throughout the fabric of American law, culture, and society. We cannot bring them back from the dead and restore them to their families and friends, but we can raise our […]

Bad theology has turned deadly

May 28, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Reconciliation

There are consequences when Christian people try to make accommodation with political power that coerces compliance. In our country right now those consequences are killing black people. In a difficult to read, but profoundly prophetic piece, William Lamar explains what is happening and lays the blame at the feet of the white evangelical Christians. William H. Lamar IV: It’s not just the coronavirus — bad theology is killing us | Faith and Leadership: Political systems […]

Rhode Island Faith Leaders on Reopening

May 27, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Religion

We recognize that congregational worship has high risk of spreading COVID-19 and could jeopardize the safety and well being of our congregants and our clergy members.  All of our traditions prioritize the care of the most vulnerable as a cornerstone of our values.  We are ever grateful for the right to freely worship and know that with it comes the responsibility to safeguard the greater good.  We yearn to be worshiping together in our traditional […]

Trust Me, This Summer Is Going to Be Tough – The Atlantic

May 26, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs

Thanks to Rob Anderson for sharing his experience with the dilemma of picking our collective way through the challenges of this summer in pandemic season. Trust Me, This Summer Is Going to Be Tough – The Atlantic: I run a restaurant in a seaside town. I’m not an epidemiologist or a fortune-teller. But as I’m forced to make what could be life-and-death decisions—with little official support or guidance—I’m left no choice but to pretend I […]

Acres of the Dead: Memorial Day 2010

May 25, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Travel

I wrote this back in 2010 – and thought today was a good day to repost it. In 2003 my brothers, father and I began a series of tromps around western Europe. The excuse was that my brothers were both living in Europe at the time. My middle brother was planting a church in Poitiers in France and my little brother’s MASH unit was attached to the 3rd Infantry Division stationed at the time in […]

Public Health: Hyper-Capitalism vs the Common Good

May 25, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs

Julian Long, who always gives us a gift when he blogs, reflecting on his father’s military service and the present pandemic, writes (in a lovely longer essay): out the backroom window | commonplaces, travel, advocacy, occasional photos, at home in St. Louis . . .: [T]his memorial day I am thinking again about my father and about this very fine polemic by Marilynne Robinson in the June 11 issue of The New York Review of […]

Coronavirus: How Will We Ever Be Safe Inside? – The Atlantic

May 23, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs

Quick post to point people to this article in The Atlantic. Derek Thompson collects the best and most recent information about how the coronavirus is spread. He points to what South Korea learned studying a particular spreading event in an office building: Coronavirus: How Will We Ever Be Safe Inside? – The Atlantic: In its conclusion, the Korean CDC writes that the spread of the virus was almost entirely limited to the one floor “despite […]

TEOTWAWKI?

May 22, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs

TEOTWAWKI. “The End of the World as we know it” is an old meme. You can read countless sci-fi novels (I have!) that use a moment of cataclysmic change to frame the narrative arc of the hero’s journey (a la Joseph Campbell). Watch Star Wars, watch the Avenger’s Movie series, etc and you’ll see what I mean. So does this present season of pandemic presage a turning of the age in human history? Maybe? Likely […]

What might come next?

May 9, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs

How Will the Coronavirus Change Us? – The Atlantic: When AIDS came into the world, disease researchers reconsidered, loudly warning of new pandemics. Journalists wrote books with titles such as The Coming Plague and Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. But not many nonscientists took these warnings to heart. The American public has not enjoyed its surprise reentry into the world of contagion and quarantine—and this unhappiness seems likely to have consequences. Scholars […]

A Prayer As We Reopen Our Communities

May 9, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs

God of pilgrims and all who journey, walk beside us as we begin down the path of restoration and recovery in our communities. Help us as we transition to a new way of being your people. Let us encounter you in friend and stranger. Help us to care for our neighbor and the outcast. May all be safe and may our new life right the wrongs of the old. This we ask in the name […]