Mercy & Justice Round-Up: January Edition

It’s a new year, but we’re back again this month with our Monthly Mercy & Justice Round-Up. This is the place we share articles, videos, and/or podcasts that have made us think lately, including content from a range of perspectives—some we agree with, others we might not.

We hope you’ll read, listen, share, learn, and grow to love others better alongside us.

• In Breaking Point, a four-part series from WNYC, you’ll hear stories that examine the intersection of poverty, mental health, and the criminal justice system—and how that plays out in our city, where one in three kids grow up in poverty and more than 10,000 inmates have psychiatric problems.
   
• "We not only need a theology about the poor, but we need a theology from the poor,” hip hop artist Sho Baraka says in his Q Ideas talk where he asks us to think about how we’ve gentrified Christianity. We have created a Jesus that fits our ideologies, he says, and that Christianity often leaves out our materially poor brothers and sisters.
   
• Racially divided housing patterns are often cited as the greatest obstacle to school desegregation. But this CityLab article argues that housing integration alone won’t result in desegregation in America’s schools. Why? “There’s little to prevent white parents, skittish about the effects of integration, from finding alternatives to their neighborhood school.” The answer the authors propose? Plans with a broad scope.
   
• More than 140,000 New York City public school students experienced homelessness in the past six years. The Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness released a report on the growth of homelessness in NYC and its lasting impact on students, as well as an interactive, school-by-school map of student homelessness.
   
• “This attitude of colorblindness is the very attitude that systemic racism can thrive on...and it is dangerous.” In the Black and White: Racism in America episode of The Liturgists podcast, listeners are exhorted to listen well and understand how those who are part of the majority culture are complicit in systems that privilege some to the harm of others.