Last Saturday, I committed myself before God, my church community, and my family and friends to take Diana Wood as my wife, “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” In fact, by the time that this blog […]Continue Reading →
Alabama made headlines last week by becoming the most recent state to pass a tough immigration law that supporters hope will drive undocumented immigrants out of the state. The bill, which one of sponsors called “an Arizona bill with an Alabama twist,” actually goes well beyond the scope of the controversial SB 1070 […]Continue Reading →
A story in the New York Times late last week highlighted an interesting phenomenon: in Arizona, where more than 70,000 acres of national forest have been burned by a wildfire, many are certain that undocumented immigrants are to blame. In fact, the rumor has spread as quickly as the wildfire that an […]Continue Reading →
Next spring, I’ll be speaking for the second consecutive year on the topic of immigration at The Justice Conference, joined by other Christian justice advocates like Francis Chan, Walter Brueggemann, Miroslav Volf, and Lynne Hybels. Increasingly, I’ve noticed evangelicals grounding their concern for immigrants in an appeal to justice, with a sensitivity […]Continue Reading →
At the heart of what it means to be an evangelical Christian is a deep belief in the gospel (evangelion). Evangelicals desire to see those who have not yet embraced and been transformed by the hope of a relationship with Jesus Christ join into the family of those who have. We share the gospel […]Continue Reading →
“Let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:8). Much of the discussion around immigration in the United States, including within our churches, focuses on questions of public policy: who should be allowed in? How should we penalize those who have broken immigration laws? How […]Continue Reading →
When I’m asked how I became interested in immigration, I sometimes mention that I grew up in a part of the country—Northeast Wisconsin—where there really aren’t many immigrants and that, as such, for lack of meaningful relationships, most of my opinions about the topic until a few years ago were formed by television and other […]Continue Reading →
Ruben Vives, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, just won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative report exposing corruption in the suburban Southern California town of Bell. City administrators there had been illegally swelling the city coffers so as to be able to pay themselves salaries of nearly a million dollars per year—until […]Continue Reading →
Like Christians the world over, I’ve been re-reading the gospel accounts of Jesus’ Last Supper, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection over the last week. In John 17, as Jesus prays for his disciples and their successors in the hours before he is arrested, he prays for our unity as his Church: …that all of them […]Continue Reading →
One of the most important themes in the New Testament for me over the past few years has been the idea that our identity, if we profess to follow Christ, is that of “aliens and strangers in the world” (1 Peter 2:11). While much of my life and work has been focused on how […]Continue Reading →
