Coffee and community
Five years ago, Brock Peters dreamed of an affordable coffee shop where everyone in the community would feel comfortable going. “Sometimes, when I walked into coffee shops in the city, I felt like ‘I’m not cool enough to be here,’ ” he says. A couple of years later, the 29-year-old Winnipegger decided to put his money…
CPT closes Indigenous solidarity team
In order to address a $265,000 deficit, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) will close its Winnipeg-based Indigenous Peoples Solidarity team at the end of March. While CPT hopes to maintain relationships with its Indigenous partners, three full-time and one half-time positions devoted to the work will end. CPT teams in Columbia, Palestine and Iraqi Kurdistan will…
‘I have no say . . .’
Leah is a lifer, and I like her. She is middle-aged and is at the beginning of her sentence. She is educated and insightful, and has a good sense of humour. But what I am impressed by is her heart. She cares about the young women with whom she shares the crowded maximum-security space in…
Evangelical social justice
I find the Catholic process of declaring saints un-Anabaptist and weird—especially the part about verifying miracles–but the Vatican’s latest candidate for sainthood is someone who has shaped my Mennonite faith. In February 1977, the established powers in El Salvador, a nation of death squads and deep church-state-oligarchy ties, settled on Oscar Romero as a safe…
More about Oscar Romero
This online supplement accompanies the viewpoint, “Evangelical social justice,” about Archbishop Oscar Romero, in which Will Braun considers Romero’s message for Mennonites. Oscar Romero’s sermons English transcripts of his sermons and Spanish audio of many of them are available at http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/homilies-and-writings/homilies Henri Nouwen comments on Oscar Romero Oscar Romero is a humble man of God. His…
Who is my neighbour?
Farmers with Firearms are flexing on Facebook. Indigenous activists are indignant. Justin Trudeau is straining to hit all the enlightened notes, as usual. And Murray Sinclair is urging justice reform, again. But will multicoloured juries, cardboard placards, online platitudes and Ottawa photo ops—all of which have their place—actually bring the healing and fairness needed for…
The lucky struggle
Fortune and misfortune can look the same in a world of incomprehensible inequality. Each year, many thousands of Jamaicans apply for coveted temporary jobs on Canadian farms. The lucky applicants will work mostly on fruit farms and greenhouse operations under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). They can stay for up to eight months, but…
Follow the money
What is the real cost of the things we buy? That’s the question I asked myself during Uprooted, a three-week learning tour for young adults through Mexico, Guatemala and Arizona that took place in May. Organized by Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Alberta and MCC Saskatchewan, the tour looked at issues surrounding migration in Central America…
Remembering the mothers of the ‘disappeared’
When I was a young child, my family lived in Chile, where my parents worked at an inter-Protestant seminary. We happened to be there to witness the end of the brutal, U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, as he was peacefully voted out of power in the late 1980s. Even as a child, I knew…
Gelassenheit and power
I got into an interesting discussion with a friend from my church recently. In adult ed., we were talking about liberation theology and its view of sin. (You can read about liberation theology and sin here.) Basically, I was affirming the feminist, womanist, and liberation view that sin does not only mean pride or the…
