“A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar who has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
— C. S. Lewis
“God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“A man who walks with God can never erase the sight of human need from his heart. He must act or forever shut his eyes. He cannot see and then be at ease. Vision carries with it a great obligation.”
— David Wilkerson
Links related to recent posts
The Secret of the Nones, June 11, 2024
Religious ‘Nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S. : NPR
Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe | Pew Research Center
Graphs about Religion | Ryan Burge | Substack
The Peter Principle, Jesus, and you, June 4, 2024
Season 13, Episode 36 – Freakonomics
When Native Americans Were Finally Welcomed: 100 years ago tomorrow, June 1, 2024
Resources on Native Americans who lived in Oregon or in the Delaware Valley:
Stephen Dow Deckham, editor. Oregon Indians: Voices from Two Centuries (Oregon State University, 2006).
Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odessey of the Delaware Indians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Jean R. Soderlund. Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.)
For further reading on the blog series starting April 6, 2024, on the Rwandan Genocide: When the Nightmare Began, Confronting the Rwandan Nightmare (May 28, 2024)
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). Gourevitch describes his travels in Rwanda after Rwandan genocide, his interviews with survivors, and his thoughts on the meaning of the genocide.
Elizabeth Mehren, I Lived to Tell the World: Stories from Survivors of Holocaust, Genocide, and the Atrocities of War (Oregon State University Press, 2024). Published in cooperation with The Immigrant Story, Mehren tells the stories of people who have lived through terrible atrocities in various parts of the world, only to find themselves in Oregon.
Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (Columbia University Press: 1995); _____. Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford University Press, Reprint edition: 2011). In The Rwanda Crisis, Prunier provides a detailed historic perspective on the long history that led up to the genocide in Rwanda and includes the actual events of those most tragic of months. Written immediately after the atrocities, it begs for a sequel, which Prunier provides with the added perspective of distance and scope in his more recent book, Africa’s World War.
Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: a World History of Genocide from Sparta to Darfur (Yale University Press, 2007). Kiernan, Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, has written extensively on the subject, starting his research and writing with the atrocities in Cambodia. In Blood and Soil, Kiernan takes a broad look at genocide both globally and historically.
The Early Warning Project is a joint initiative of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocice at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.
When our nation shut its doors, May 25, 2024
For an in-depth study on immigration in the U.S., see Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner, Immigration: An American History (Yale University Press, 2022).
For an ethical analysis, see Joseph H. Carens. The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013).
And for a beautiful collection of oil paintings and stories portraying our diverse nation, see George W. Bush. Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants (Crown Publishers, 2021).
For additional resources, you are welcome to inquire at Contact Us!
Border Agents I have known: Helen Gilkerson, May 21, 2024
Most of Helen’s story I knew directly from her. Here are additional sources I used:
Lois J. Stucky, “Called, Chosen, and Faithful,” Herald of His Coming, April 2004.
Paul Buttrey, Taiwan Missionary Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1, Summer 2001.
Where Does the Power Come From, May 18, 2024
If you have never seen my all-time favorite movie, I highly recommend Chariots of Fire.
To watch the “Power from within” scene in the movie: https://youtu.be/kbgR-pOIFbE?si=5crMMQ1llifw6rkI
Brown v Board is 70 years old, May 14, 2024
For a fuller look at Brown v. Board: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka :: 347 U.S. 483 (1954) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center
To read the Declaration of Independence: Declaration of Independence: A Transcription | National Archives
Mother’s Day Taught Me that Women Belong in the Pulpit, May 11, 2024
Dr. Edith Blumhofer
https://www.wheaton.edu/news/recent-news/2020/march/remembering-dr-edith-blumhofer
Reverend Wanda Carter
https://news.ag.org/en/articlerepository/news/2020/06/interview-with-wanda-carter
When Candidates Make Bad Calls, May 4, 2024 – the housing crisis
Fact_Sheet_Summarized_Findings.pdf (hud.gov)
Nowhere to Go: Homelessness among formerly incarcerated people | Prison Policy Initiative
How homelessness in Oregon started, grew and became a statewide crisis – OPB
Youth and Young Adults – National Alliance to End Homelessness
How many homeless people are in the US? What does the data miss? (usafacts.org)
Youth Homelessness Overview (ncsl.org)
Politics vs Faith, April 8, 2024 – for more information on the Bebbington Quadrilateral
David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A history from the 1730s to the 1980s (Routledge, 1988).