Editorial
Editorial: Occupying Everything
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What I love about having conversations with vibrant, intelligent, people is that you often find yourself verbalizing your beliefs in a distilled and succinct manner that may never have occurred in solitude. In this case, I was having lunch with a retired Lutheran minister, a member of my wife’s family, and our conversation turned to social justice and the Occupy movement. Specifically, we were talking about “Occupy faith” initiatives that have been springing up to support the movement, and what the role of faith communities should be regarding outcry over economic injustice. I posited that this moment in history provided a rare opportunity for the dwindling mainline Protestant congregations, and for progressive Catholics, to provide the infrastructure, support, and moral guidance they did during the height of the civil rights era, before a confluence of political and social shifts resulted in a profound shift in our collective priorities and goals. After all, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final campaign before being assassinated was the Poor People’s Campaign (and enshrining economic justice in our constitution has been around at least since Roosevelt).