I’m teaching Sunday school this month. My first day was yesterday. Usually, teaching Sunday school is a hellish experience, more akin to a cage fight than the idyllic picture of children learning quietly about Jesus around a table. We are lucky if we can get through the lesson without someone using the word ‘boobs’ or … Continue reading
Category Archives: Social Justice
On Why My Feelings Need to Share the Stage
Do you know what I realized last night? During elementary, middle, and high school, I only had ONE teacher of color. Yep, Señora Batts, middle school Spanish teacher, was a Latina woman. Other than her, I cannot think of a single instructor, band director, principal, coach looked like me. Even at Texas A&M, I can only … Continue reading
Shooting Nerf Guns at Moving Cars
Truth: I would not have wanted to parent my father when he was a child. He was a complete mess. As a toddler, he climbed over the fence and started to walk towards the circus. As a teenager, he rolled the car out of the garage and took it on a joy ride. He replaced … Continue reading
My Very First Protest
About a month ago, on a Friday night, I drove to my friend Karen’s apartment and we car-pooled down to an elementary school in Oak Cliff, which is a neighborhood in south Dallas where several unarmed black men have been shot by Dallas police. We were responding to a facebook invite that we had gotten to … Continue reading
The Splinters of Entitlement
When you guys are ready to adopt and you come to me freaking out about the home study, I will give you three key pieces of advice: 1. Make sure to remove the beer that you use to wash your hair with from under your bathroom sink. (Beer in the bathroom doesn’t bode well for … Continue reading
The Wise Guy-de to Making Ethical Purchasing Decisions
If you’re a friend on facebook, then you know how ecstatic I am when I find American made goods in unlikely places. I have a visceral reaction. For instance, when we planted our garden, I knew that I wanted to make my own pest control products so that I could control what was going on … Continue reading
Let’s Talk About Race, Baby
I was talking to my friend Joe the other day about racial privilege. Joe is extremely thoughtful about social issues and often alerts me to things that I wasn’t aware of. While we were talking about all the “isms”, Joseph mentioned that, as a white male, he never thinks about his safety. Never. Thinks. About. … Continue reading
Repost: Hey Sexy Lady
(Original 2010 xanga post here) Oh,wait. It’s a 12 year old girl. At the beginning of the summer, I decided to start throwing in some nonfiction reading so that I can know some things. (I started out with The Wal-Mart Effect, which was an excellent read and ended my love/hate relationship with Wal-Mart (now, there’s … Continue reading
Factory Workers Plead for Help
Have you heard about the letter hidden by a Chinese factory worker that was found by a woman in Wisconsin who bought some stuff from a Kmart in Oregon? You can imagine that if I found a letter like this: I would drop everything, fly immediately to China, and offer to adopt all of the factory … Continue reading
Responsible Shopping: The Princess Conundrum
Well, I laid it all out on the table last week when I said that I was done with purchasing not-fairly-made things. Big commitment. One I’m kind of excited about. I thought I would kind of give myself an easy start- you know, like buying an American-made Slinky or an American flag. Nope. There were … Continue reading
welderbeth 