The following is the opening paragraph of a story being covered by the NY Times:

The mining company, BHP, plans to move ahead with an expansion project that will destroy at least 40 ancient Indigenous sites in Western Australia — just days after a national outcry over the razing of another archaeological site.

In the midst of the outcries in our own country over racist killings and injustices against people of color and native people in our own country, this report sent me over the edge. It illustrates one more way in which white folks in power tend to have no regard for people or sacred places that stand in the way of their greed.

I just wrote my two senators to support taking a stand in the Senate to make a statement of disgust for the actions of the mining companies and show some solidarity with native people and the importance of preserving sacred cultural landmarks.

WTF is next?

This is the opening paragraph in the book I co-edited with a colleague at Boston College:

            Growing up in Baltimore and attending Catholic schools there in the 1950s and 1960s contributed meaningfully to my awakening to social, economic, and educational injustice. My senior year religion teacher, a De La Sale Christian brother, challenged us students to delve deeply into social issues of race, war, and poverty and the nature of God and God’s presence and participation in the world. At the large secular university I attended in the Northeast, this awakening continued as I witnessed the African American students demanding greater educational equity and marched in Washington against the Vietnam War, influenced in part by the example of the University’s Catholic chaplain. Fast forward a couple of decades when, as a faculty member at Loyola University Maryland (then Loyola College in Maryland) I developed service-learning courses and accompanied my students to underserved urban communities and Catholic schools and challenged them as my high school religion teacher had challenged me. Since I first started to examine the effectiveness of urban Nativity schools in Baltimore in the mid-1990s, I have involved myself in a number of community- and Catholic-led initiatives aimed at addressing issues of urban poverty, violence, and educational injustice. Most memorable about these encounters have been the Catholic religious and lay women and men who commit to the painstaking work of breaking the cycle of poverty through education in important and heroic Christ-like ways.

Our book contains chapters on Nativity and NativityMiguel Schools, Cristo Rey Schools, and Fe y Alegria schools, as well as Homeboy Industries, all of which were started by Jesuits and have grown to address issues of educational injustice, particularly in urban areas, and improve the lives of tens of thousands of children, adolescents, and adults deprived of equal access to high quality schools because of racism and the greed of white privilege and power. To think that there are millions of dollars being spent to help re-elect a racist tyrant committed to tearing down our fragile society when they could be spent providing high quality education and work for everyone and build a more just society sickens me to the core.

Check out: https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Responding-to-the-Call-for-Educational-Justice