“My teachers shot.” That’s what a 10th grader texted her mom on Wednesday, Sept. 4, from a locked-down school room at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. There was “blood everywhere,” she later recounted. And another teacher “put pressure on…
We should follow the words of Jesus, ‘No more of this!’
For as long as I can remember, I have loved watching rivers, with their beautiful shapes, surfaces and movements. If you’ve ever watched a river, I’m sure you’ve noticed its current is a powerful thing. It shapes the river’s boundaries…
How long will we tolerate The Lottery?
My middle school memory keeps rewinding the film our teacher showed one day of this disturbing short story by Shirley Jackson. Everyone in a small town is assembling. Something important is about to happen. Like a human Farmer’s Almanac, one…
Apalachee High School: The questions that haunt me at night
I am writing this post very early in the morning of Friday, Sept. 6. It is less than 48 hours after 14-year-old Colt Gray decided to start his freshman year at Apalachee High School, 40 minutes north of me, by…
Dispatches from a Black trauma surgeon
Within these four walls I have wrecked the lives of far too many Black mothers. The family room is a windowless, white-walled cell in the hospital, with hazy fluorescent lighting, hard-bottomed plastic chairs, and a worn end table with a…
The NRA is a (mostly) changed organization, but the American public must not look away
In 2018, I did something most people wouldn’t dare do. While making a play about guns in America, I took a group of high school students to the NRA annual meeting in our hometown of Dallas. What we saw and…
T-shirts send a message about gun violence
Churches across Texas are participating in a campaign to raise awareness about gun violence and build coalitions focused on its prevention. Texas Impact designed its Vidas Robadas — Spanish for “Taken Lives” — project to connect university and church-based advocates…
Christians could bring down the heat on the gun debate, author says
There is a way to reduce the anger and polarization around America’s gun debate by using tenets of faith, according to Michael Austin, author of God and Guns in America. “We really can reduce gun violence in the United States…
Dallas police shootings were a turning point for Black trauma surgeon
Brian Williams’ entire life changed in the summer of 2016 as a trauma surgeon working in Dallas. That was the night five Dallas police officers were gunned down amid a peaceful protest of police killings of Black men nationwide. The…