We fear so many things, the Rev. Dr. Cáudio Carvalhaes told worshipers last week during a celebration of 35 years of ministry by Presbyterian Border Region Outreach.
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 Presbyterian border ministry last week.
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 last week’s “Responding to an Exodus: Gospel Hospitality and Empire” celebration of 35 years of ministry by Presbyterian Border Region Outreach’s Frontera de Cristo. Carvalhaes led a Friday morning workshop he called “Preaching from the Darkness” at First Presbyterian Church in Douglas, Arizona.
Raised in both Douglas, Arizona and nearby Agua Prieta, 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.