Mercy & Justice Round-Up: January Edition

m&j jan

How is Christian hospitality radically different from Southern hospitality? Where do we start the work of reconciliation and bridge building? What does the Apostle Paul have to say about ethnic arrogance? You’ll find articles, talks, and resources that speak to these questions and more in this month’s Mercy & Justice Round-Up.

As always, this is a collection of content that got us thinking lately and includes a range of perspectives— some we agree with, others we might not. We hope you’ll read, listen, learn and love better with us.

  • “You can’t lead people where you’re not willing to go yourself personally,” LaTasha Morrison says of working toward racial reconciliation. “This work starts first in your home, in your heart.” Watch Morrison's Q Ideas interview on Building Bridges for more, including where to start—educate yourself, look at your friendships and who you follow on social media (do they all look like you?), and diversify your surroundings.
     
  • Take a look at this interactive city map showing suspension rates for each NYC school district—and makes apparent the sharp divide in suspension rates by neighborhood, as well as the fact that “black students and students with disabilities bear a disproportionate share of the city’s suspensions.”
     
  • What is radically ordinary hospitality? “First of all, it is not entertainment. Hospitality is about meeting the stranger and welcoming that stranger to become a neighbor,” says Rosaria Butterfield in an interview with Christianity Today. She also speaks to why Christians are hesitant to be hospitable (“we’ve made idols out of our white carpet and our boundaries”) and how her own experience shaped her understanding.
     
  • Of his photos documenting Chinatown in the 1980s, published recently in The New York Times, Bud Glick writes, “The photographs tell a quintessential American immigrant story of persistence to gain a foothold in a society that excludes them racially, socially, economically, and culturally.”
     
  • In “Ethnic Arrogance Dies Beneath the Cross,” John Piper writes about how the Apostle Paul’s writings helped awaken him to his own racism and ethnic arrogance. Piper writes, “People from every ethnicity, ransomed by the blood of Jesus. Why? So we might be priests serving the Lord together in one temple, co-reigning in one kingdom with Christ."