Rev. Lizzie

BOSTON I will see you next week!! I’m speaking Friday night at 8pm as part of a storytelling event for SNEUCC at The White Room in Worcester, and then offering a workshop the next day on social media for ministry & churches 💕 Hope to see you there!!

Happy pub day to the incredible Kristin DuMez!!

LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE: THE SECRET HISTORY OF WHITE CHRISTIAN WOMEN AND THE WORLD THEY MADE is a tour de force. It’s the first history of American Christianity in the 20th century that I completely saw myself inside of — even as someone who was always evangelical-adjacent, not full-on rapture-fearing. I want everyone to read this book, because it is brilliant and also because Dr. Du Mez is a brilliant, kind, and deeply hopeful scholar.

I’m also thrilled to share Dr. Du Mez recorded an interview with Laura Peaches and I on And Also With You Podcast which will be out in 2 weeks so stay tuned for that! 🩷🖤

I knew I had made an enormous mistake.

In fairness to myself, they had told me they wanted the deep cuts. The real Bible study stuff, not the light fluff they were used to new interns providing. Not something you could buy canned from a shelf in a bookstore.

“Have you ever read Nahum?” Only a few — the Biblical studies professors, the former missionaries — nodded. “How about Jonah?” The entire room lit up. “I think we might enjoy comparing the two. You see, they’re both about Israel and Nineveh, but they are … vastly different treatments of enemies, and mercy.”

I had meant well. I really had.

But then the following week came, the week we were going to begin our comparative study of one of the most-beloved books (Jonah) and one of the most haunting (Nahum).

We were doing our usual check-in, going around the circle and offering a sentence about our day or a quirky ice-breaker question, and Ms. Susie* — always sparkling — piped up.

Continue reading: https://revlizzie.substack.com/p/nineveh?r=28v8h9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

I had a bad spiral yesterday over the AI whistleblower and the climate. Like a lot of y’all, I feel terrified and angry and overwhelmed with helplessness in the face of YET ANOTHER seemingly insurmountable crisis.

Despair is a natural response. But if we stay there, immobilized and terrified, the tyrants win.

As BOTH climate scientists and Scripture have reminded me — hope is a practice. Living and undaunted. We have more capacity than destruction than ever before, which also means we have more capacity for creation.

Hope is not lost. We are still alive and able to resist. We are not alone. We can make conscious changes in small and big ways.

Tyrants WANT us to think we cannot do anything, so they can do whatever they want without consequence. If that makes you angry, good. Anger can be a powerful fuel. Anger and hope commingle when we climb up from despair. Anger will not be our only fuel, but she has a tender and fierce role in all the ways we grit our teeth and keep resisting.

Remember who profits when we are hopeless.
Remember what is terrified when are hopeful.

Happy Labor Day!
“Pray for the dead, fight like hell for the living!”

“Mary Harris “Mother” Jones rose to prominence as a fiery orator and fearless organizer for the Mine Workers during the first two decades of the 20th century. Her voice had great carrying power. Her energy and passion inspired people half her age into action and compelled them to join in the struggle.

Born August 1, 1837, as Mary Harris in Cork County, Ireland, the woman who would become Mother Jones immigrated to North America with her family as a child to escape the Irish potato famine.

In her early 20s, she moved to Chicago, where she worked as a dressmaker, and then to Memphis, Tenn., where she met and married George Jones. The couple had four children when tragedy struck: A yellow fever epidemic in 1867, which killed hundreds of people, took the lives of Mary’s husband and all four children.

Mary moved back to Chicago and returned to commercial dressmaking. She opened her own shop, patronized by some of the wealthiest women in town. According to one account of her life, Mary’s interest in the union movement grew when she sewed for wealthy Chicago families. “I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking alongside the frozen lake front,” she said. “The tropical contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care.”

Tragedy struck Mary again when she lost everything in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. After the fire, Mary began to travel across the country, from town to town in support of workers’ struggles.

Mother Jones’ organizing methods were unique for her time. She welcomed African American workers and involved women and children in strikes. She staged parades with children carrying signs that read, “We Want to Go to School and Not to the Mines.”

May we be inspired by Mother Jones today to stand alongside the most vulnerable among us!

Commissioned by Leslie Albanese

Signed Giclee Prints: kellylatimoreicons.com