There is a reason we use language carefully. Words matter. They have the power to exclude others and to create hurtful categories.
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Seeking Restoration
Congolese refugees and CBF field personnel build Beloved Community in Raleigh By Blake Tommey In 1994, the first time the Pew Research Center polled Americans about the effect of immigrants on the country, 63 percent agreed that immigrants are “a…
Barth, Church and migrants in Calais
Last week, French authorities began clearing an area of Calais called the “Jungle.” After enduring war and poverty, millions of people fled the Middle East, Asia and Africa. About 7,000 men, women, and children built a shanty town near the…
Mission work takes on legal dimensions for Va.-based field personnel
Mission work and ministry are taking on a dizzying array of new looks in the 21st century. Just ask Greg and Sue Smith, Baptist missionaries who spent years performing traditional mission work in Latin America before opening a ministry serving…
More than lies and immigration
La versión en español está disponible aquí. “Someone is lying,” I told my son last Wednesday night as I kept flipping channels between the U.S. news networks and the Mexican ones. The major news was Donald Trump’s day trip to…
Brexit, Trump and the Stranger
The news of the British referendum shook the world this week, sending financial markets into turmoil, prompting rage from British Millennials, and inspiring no small amount of fear in an American public. Few waited very long to draw comparisons between…
Immigrants who aren’t supposed to be in the room
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar? With these words,…
Prairie burning and new life
On a recent road trip through southern Kansas, I witnessed a spring rite, the burning of the prairie. The billowing smoke and red glow of distant fires are quite the vista — and a sign of renewal. The distinctive smell…
Thoughts on welcoming the stranger
By LeDayne McLeese Polaski I’ve been thinking a lot lately about strangers. I suppose we all have. Strangers — immigrants from Central America, refugees from Syria, Muslims crossing international borders, even people on the other side of town — are…