Author name: Josh deLacy

I’m transgender, I’m a layperson, and I’m 39 years old. I grew up in a tongues-talking United Methodist Church in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, where my dad was the pastor. We were a poor congregation in a poor community, deeply divided over the inclusion and dignity of LGBTQ+ people. I remember thinking to […]

Faith-based organizer Aaron Scott has been named gender justice staff officer—a new Episcopal Church position called for by the 80th General Convention that is dedicated to LGBTQ+ and women’s ministries. He will start on April 30. Scott co-founded Chaplains on the Harbor, and he most recently worked at Union Theological Seminary’s Kairos Center as project

I grew up attending a very rural, poor church, this tiny place in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate NY. My family was working class. My mom left home at sixteen and when I was a kid she became really involved with her union, my grandma was a factory floor organizer (once interrogated

White Christian nationalists and a broader authoritarian movement are mounting a visionary, well-resourced, and strategically coordinated effort to ensure white Christians maintain their ongoing dominance in all sectors of U.S. society, including government, culture, media, entertainment, family, religion, and business. Our social movements, including the institutions that comprise civil society, are lagging behind as white

I grew up in rural upstate New York, where life was difficult and often isolating. Folks in our community were very poor, but we took care of one another. Neighbors lavished affection and support on my family. Still, there was a deep undercurrent of abandonment and anger. Far from the South, Confederate flags pierced the

It may be too late for temperance. It is, at the very least, much too late for temperance as we have long advertised it. We weaponize our understanding of temperance in American society, particularly against the poor. Imperialism and Protestantism, doused with the gasoline of white supremacy and set ablaze by capitalism, centuries ago hammered

The uprising against police violence that took place at New York City’s Stonewall Inn in June of 1969 is often considered to be the historic breakthrough moment for the LGBTQ movement in the United States. The Stonewall uprising was also a poor people’s movement. We have lost track of this in our collective, national memory.

Why has our government abandoned us? That’s what poor and low-wealth people asked members of Congress during a briefing Wednesday on issues that included poverty, immigrant and Indigenous rights, ecological devastation, the denial of health care and militarism. “We aren’t poor because we’re lazy. We’re poor because the laws and policies in this country are