The Winding Road to Racial Justice (COVID-19 blog no. 18)
In 2019, prior to the pandemic, the Amazon Synod took place and reinforced CARJ in its understanding of its role. We learned from the final document of the Amazon Synod that “synodality” is the process of Christians walking together in the practice of discernment, in order to read the “signs of the times”.[5] It can take place at various levels – small communities, parishes, dioceses, regions or globally; and it involves listening, dialogue, prayerful discernment and communal decision making.
Rooting the Cross in its soil: the danger of sanitising grassroots movements during COVID-19
On the matter of black lives (COVID-19 blog no. 17)
Regime change (COVID-19 blog no. 13)
Regimes never break cleanly. Hitchens and his allies are right that the removal of statues to slavers and imperialists marks an end. But their timing is badly out of kilter. Like the fall of Lenin in Kiev in 2014, the dismantling of statues now marks the end of a regime which fell a long time ago, the statues are shards of an older social and political order protruding into a world now governed by very different ideologies and principles.
The pandemic within the pandemic: Why Black Lives Matter in the Body of Christ (COVID-19 blog no. 11)
It is clear that racism is the pandemic within the pandemic, which was once held at the inarticulate level or the politically unconscious level for the most part, but has now come to the fore. The whole world is waking up to the reality of racism, and there is a renewed desire for anti-racist action.