A “narrative of hate and rejection” is spreading across Mexico in response to the caravans of migrants from Central America and elsewhere, a Mexican lawyer and human rights defender told the 150 or so people attending the “Responding to an Exodus: Gospel Hospitality and Empire” celebration of 35 years of work and service by Presbyterian Border Region Outreach. One of the five ministries, Frontera de Cristo, hosted the fall conference.
The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) and World Mission organized a gathering with ecumenical representatives from around the world this past fall in Bangkok. The purpose was to have deeper conversations about worldwide crises such as climate, weakened democracy within nations and increasingly divisive practices among nations.
There’s a growing cultural understanding that mental health is an integral part of one’s whole health, and the church can play a vital role in it, said the Rev. Rose McCurdy, vice moderator of the new Presbyterian Mental Health Network.
As one of the newest regional liaisons hired to serve East Central Africa, I have been traveling a lot, and sometimes it feels as though I am living in and out of airports more than in my home in Lusaka, Zambia. You know what, though? I can’t complain! As I travel within the countries that I serve — Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia — I have the opportunity to see God’s amazing work through the hands, voices, eyes and feet of our international Presbyterian partners. Partners who are trying to repair the brokenness among God’s children. Partners who, in their own ways, are attempting to serve and provide for “the least of these” — through means like building and maintaining community schools and theological institutions; building health facilities and clinics; and ministering in hospitals, clinics and prisons.
Shannon Schmidt is currently teaching the ethics curriculum she designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The course is split between MIT students and incarcerated students who are working toward their bachelor’s degrees and is taught in a prison-based setting. In addition to this work, Schmidt serves as a facilitator for a support group for formerly incarcerated men in Boston.
“They said their teacher has not come,” said Peter, the education facilitator for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) partner Across, translated from Anyuak to English.
“Where are your friends?” came the next question to the 10 boys sitting in the muddy field.
Surgery, complications from surgery, adverse reactions to medications, and more emergency room visits than I can remember have been an unfortunate fact of life for us as a family. When we’d go to the emergency room, I was always prepared for, yet staggered by, a question the triage nurses are required to ask of everyone: “Are you safe at home?”
As a boy growing up in Brazil, the Rev. Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes said he was afraid of the dark. At bedtime it comforted him that his father had the light on in the next room. “I could see the light where he was, and that was my resting place,” said Carvalhaes, associate professor of worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, during the recent “Responding to an Exodus: Gospel Hospitality and Empire” celebration of 35 years of ministry by Presbyterian Border Region Outreach, formerly Presbyterian Border Ministry, and hosted by Frontera de Cristo. Carvalhaes led a workshop he called “Preaching from the Darkness” at First Presbyterian Church in Douglas, Arizona.
Raised in both Douglas, Arizona, and nearby Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, which is just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, artist and community college instructor M. Jenea Sanchez has an interest in the kind of public art that’s a simultaneous expression of hope and resistance.
According to the Rev. (Capt.) Lyman M. Smith, director of the Presbyterian Council for Chaplains and Military Personnel, “more than 18 million veterans live among us. And of those 18 million, some 18 are likely to die by suicide today.”
