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Rev. Dr. Lee B. Spitzer offers his thoughts on how American followers of Jesus should come to grips with the reality and implications of our country’s historical record of racist actions and structures. He determines that although offering reparations is certainly a societal collective responsibility that must be addressed, we should also embrace the more personal spiritual discipline of reparations.

Clergy from across the country have joined the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign in calling on Congress to vote on issues related to fair wages, voting rights, and poverty reduction ahead of the midterm elections. The letters were the latest plea by the movement that has since 2018 modeled itself on the campaign started by Martin Luther King Jr. that focused on what King called the “three evils” of racism, poverty, and militarism.

Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has co-opted the vision of the sacrifice of Jesus to bless a false rite of military sacrifice. In this bloody vision of Christian Nationalism, we find many warnings. So, in this issue of A Public Witness, we look at religious support and criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And we hold up a candle to expose sacrilegious efforts to conflate church and state.

College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro, N.C., found itself in the news last week when the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee voted to remove it from its rolls because of its “open affirmation, approval and endorsement of homosexual behavior.” That action came 23 years after the congregation itself voted to leave the SBC shortly after the convention’s annual meeting approved a doctrinal statement that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s authority.

Darron LaMonte Edwards writes that while there are many pathways to success through education, most of those pathways for Black and Brown students still have roadblocks and only a select few can tread that path. We are almost in 2023 and it still feels like we are enduring the struggle W.E.B. Du Bois was addressing in 1903. And this is why every school district should have an equity plan.

To the world, Harper Lee was aloof to the point of being unknowable, an obsessively private person who spent most of her life avoiding the public gaze despite writing one of the best-selling books ever, To Kill a Mockingbird. To Wayne Flynt, the Alabama-born author was his friend, Nelle.

For two decades, Hinkle was editor of The Pathway, the official publication of the Missouri Baptist Convention, founded in 2002 amid a feud between conservatives and moderates in the state. Conservative leaders hired Hinkle, a former newspaper editor turned seminarian and Christian journalist, to lead the new publication — meant to rival Word&Way.

Brian Kaylor reports from the 2022 general council of the European Baptist Federation in Riga, Latvia. A focus of the gathering is the war on Ukraine and how to support believers in the nation and refugees fleeing to other countries.

Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf argues that while much of the criticism of recent political stunts using immigrants has rightfully focused on the deception and cruelty, Christians ought to take it one step further: these American politicians have not only trafficked vulnerable Venezuelans, they have trafficked Christ. Jesus not only identifies with the poor, vulnerable, and imprisoned – Jesus is these people.

With the pope surrounded by empty seats in Kazakhstan, critics questioned the efficacy of his diplomacy of encounter and his strategy of silence when it comes to outright condemning human rights violations in China, Russia and Nicaragua. But Vatican diplomacy insiders urge patience, arguing that even as the pope remains silent, the institution’s diplomatic corps is hard at work behind the scenes, advancing the cause for dialogue.