Category Archives: current events

Water, wine, and justice like an ever-flowing stream

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

On sabbatical, I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I can’t begin to describe briefly the impact of walking that history of inhumanity and human dignity set up in opposition to one another, the weight of those ceilings, each one a century, and the heaviness of your footsteps as you climb closer to our own day of reckoning. Continue reading →

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Olive branches over ordnance

Posted on November 8, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

The olive trees, ancient and observant, hearing the blood that cries out from the land, whisper that the answer to Cain’s crime cannot be to take the hoe from his hand and hand him an AR-15. Continue reading →

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What will we do?

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

We participate in one another’s futures. So we will offer our presence, our presence of mind, our best efforts to love one another in word, in deed, by statute. Continue reading →

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We talked about this

Posted on October 28, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Shackled to the shadows of a brutalist building, words barely grazing our lips, we talked about this. Our breath stirred the air, that sabbath exhalation at the end of creation; the wordless sigh of God.

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Salt and sabbatical

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

But that is the theology of Thomas the Tank Engine, who longs only to hear the Fat Controller call him “a useful little engine.” It is not the theology found in the Bible nor in the Word of God, Jesus the Christ, who celebrates the meek and the helpless, the poor in spirit and the hopeless, the errant and the outcast, the ungodlike. Continue reading →

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Conjuring Esther

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Esther has become difficult to read. Her story makes me angry and afraid. We read it like a fairytale. But like so many fairytales, it teems with themes of horror dressed up in satin and silk. Continue reading →

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Love, lies, and blessing

Posted on September 16, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

We can protect our tongues from bitterness and our souls from shame by keeping to the truth, and holding fast to the hope that Christ has set before us, and following him, step by step, word by word, in the way of the cross, the way of God’s unimaginable love, for all whom God has made in the image of the living God. Continue reading →

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If compassion were king

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Never think that there is nothing to be done. Never imagine that your smallest gesture of compassion, your insufficient word of kindness, your little piece of love in action is wasted. Continue reading →

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Mother of exiles

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

We gathered in song in a baseball park adjacent to the prison. Our hosts advised us that the women inside could hear us rallying and praying on their behalf. Continue reading →

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Murdering Truth

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

It seems as though when we have beaten truth into our own image, and still it insists on speaking its own mind, we wash our hands of it. We make enemies of purveyors of inconvenient information. We shoot the messenger. Continue reading →

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