Latest news with #UnitedMethodist
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Church leaders criticize ICE presence during preschool pickup in Charlotte
CHARLOTTE (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — A United Methodist church in the Charlotte area became the site of unexpected federal law enforcement activity when armed ICE agents conducted an operation during preschool pickup. No arrests were made, but the May 20 incident raised alarm among families and church leaders. PREVIOUS: Details emerge about Mexican national arrested by ICE near Charlotte school The Western North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church (WNCC) condemned the operation in a May 22 statement, calling it a disruption to sacred space. 'Churches should not be staging grounds for law enforcement,' the group said, emphasizing that their facilities are meant to be safe spaces for all people, regardless of immigration status. PREVIOUS: ICE activity near Charlotte East Language Academy drop-off area sparks concern The event comes amid what advocates describe as heightened ICE activity in Charlotte and other major cities since the Trump administration returned to office. Queen City News has reached out to ICE for comment. The WNCC said it remains committed to protecting the sanctity of its spaces and the dignity of those who seek refuge within them. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
NC House bills will undercut services to homeless vets
People experiencing homelessness in Raleigh pack to leave an encampment off of Highway 70 near Interstate 40. (Photo: Greg Childress) As a U.S. Navy veteran, I am honored to manage a team that serves other veterans who find themselves without a home in North Carolina. In my role as director of outreach for Veterans Services of The Carolinas (VSC), our team collaborates daily with the faith-based community, mental health and substance use providers, LME/MCOs, law enforcement, housing providers, and others across all 100 counties of North Carolina. That experience has provided us with deep insight into what works and what doesn't. Two pending bills in the North Carolina General Assembly will have a direct impact on our communities, service providers, law enforcement, and those we serve. Both are promoted—as they were in other targeted states —by an interest group out of Austin, Texas, called Cicero Action. Joe Lonsdale, its founder, is a venture capitalist with ties to those in private prison contracting, including technology for the newer field of e-carceration. One bill – House Bill 437 – would criminalize nonprofits like ours by threatening felony charges if drug activity occurs within 100 feet of our facilities — an extreme and unworkable standard that punishes service providers for circumstances beyond their control. The other — House Bill 781 — establishes new requirements on cities and counties to set up state-sanctioned homeless encampments for up to a year without additional funding. Going after nonprofits and supporting unfunded mandates is not on-brand for the state of North Carolina, but neither is disrespecting our faith-based and veteran leaders who the Cicero lobbyists characterize as unserious activists. Representatives for four bishops overseeing 1200 North Carolina Episcopal and United Methodist churches joined VSC and other veterans in sharing concerns about these bills and the impacts they will have at multiple House committee podiums. And yet, the bill passed out of the House and now awaits a round of committee hearings in the Senate. Under the guise of a self-described think tank, the Cicero Institute—in the absence of data—blames the Housing First model for the increase of homelessness. From Texas, it declares there is no lack of affordable housing in North Carolina and glosses over how two out of three of its residents experiencing homelessness in recent years are experiencing it for the first time. Prioritizing housing with wrap-around services—the housing first model—has been the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs approach since 2012. More than 133,000 veterans were housed and provided with supportive services to help them retain housing over the last three years. The practice was first introduced by the George W. Bush Administration and has enjoyed subsequent bipartisan support because of data showing its effectiveness. The average number of returns to homelessness across the state utilizing Housing First is less than 13%. The City of Raleigh estimates it costs $96,000 a year in emergency services, law enforcement and health care for a homeless person living outside. As Raleigh's News & Observer reported recently, putting someone in a home and making services available costs $20,000 — saving taxpayers' $76,000 per person. In contrast, another local government projected the cost of installing just one Greenflow unit to provide the bill's requirement of running water and restrooms at up to $200,000 alone. Will local governments have to add this cost and others in their capital improvement or their regular budgets to meet the state's approval? Will property tax increases be required to move the state-sanctioned encampments around each year? Additionally, legal counsels from local governments have raised concerns about increased liability and incarceration along with decreased local control–as reported by their colleagues in states where the Cicero bills have passed into law. Cicero offers no data to indicate its proposal will do anything to end homelessness—just make it less visible. A month after the Florida encampment law went into effect last year, the first lawsuit was filed, resulting in a hasty sweep of an encampment without a plan for where people would go. Ongoing treatment for substance use and medications for mental illness are interrupted or lost when caseworkers and peer support specialists cannot find those they serve. State-sanctioned, compulsive homeless encampments will drive unsheltered veterans further from the resources needed and further away from sustainable recovery, while putting the onus on our local law enforcement. Especially in the context of yesterday's annual observance of Memorial Day, it makes no sense for our leaders to pass laws that criminalize those who have given up so much for the freedoms we enjoy. Our General Assembly members would serve their communities more effectively by investing in solutions that have been proven to work and are cost effective.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
NC House bills will undercut services to homeless vets
People experiencing homelessness in Raleigh pack to leave an encampment off of Highway 70 near Interstate 40. (Photo: Greg Childress) As a U.S. Navy veteran, I am honored to manage a team that serves other veterans who find themselves without a home in North Carolina. In my role as director of outreach for Veterans Services of The Carolinas (VSC), our team collaborates daily with the faith-based community, mental health and substance use providers, LME/MCOs, law enforcement, housing providers, and others across all 100 counties of North Carolina. That experience has provided us with deep insight into what works and what doesn't. Two pending bills in the North Carolina General Assembly will have a direct impact on our communities, service providers, law enforcement, and those we serve. Both are promoted—as they were in other targeted states —by an interest group out of Austin, Texas, called Cicero Action. Joe Lonsdale, its founder, is a venture capitalist with ties to those in private prison contracting, including technology for the newer field of e-carceration. One bill – House Bill 437 – would criminalize nonprofits like ours by threatening felony charges if drug activity occurs within 100 feet of our facilities — an extreme and unworkable standard that punishes service providers for circumstances beyond their control. The other — House Bill 781 — establishes new requirements on cities and counties to set up state-sanctioned homeless encampments for up to a year without additional funding. Going after nonprofits and supporting unfunded mandates is not on-brand for the state of North Carolina, but neither is disrespecting our faith-based and veteran leaders who the Cicero lobbyists characterize as unserious activists. Representatives for four bishops overseeing 1200 North Carolina Episcopal and United Methodist churches joined VSC and other veterans in sharing concerns about these bills and the impacts they will have at multiple House committee podiums. And yet, the bill passed out of the House and now awaits a round of committee hearings in the Senate. Under the guise of a self-described think tank, the Cicero Institute—in the absence of data—blames the Housing First model for the increase of homelessness. From Texas, it declares there is no lack of affordable housing in North Carolina and glosses over how two out of three of its residents experiencing homelessness in recent years are experiencing it for the first time. Prioritizing housing with wrap-around services—the housing first model—has been the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs approach since 2012. More than 133,000 veterans were housed and provided with supportive services to help them retain housing over the last three years. The practice was first introduced by the George W. Bush Administration and has enjoyed subsequent bipartisan support because of data showing its effectiveness. The average number of returns to homelessness across the state utilizing Housing First is less than 13%. The City of Raleigh estimates it costs $96,000 a year in emergency services, law enforcement and health care for a homeless person living outside. As Raleigh's News & Observer reported recently, putting someone in a home and making services available costs $20,000 — saving taxpayers' $76,000 per person. In contrast, another local government projected the cost of installing just one Greenflow unit to provide the bill's requirement of running water and restrooms at up to $200,000 alone. Will local governments have to add this cost and others in their capital improvement or their regular budgets to meet the state's approval? Will property tax increases be required to move the state-sanctioned encampments around each year? Additionally, legal counsels from local governments have raised concerns about increased liability and incarceration along with decreased local control–as reported by their colleagues in states where the Cicero bills have passed into law. Cicero offers no data to indicate its proposal will do anything to end homelessness—just make it less visible. A month after the Florida encampment law went into effect last year, the first lawsuit was filed, resulting in a hasty sweep of an encampment without a plan for where people would go. Ongoing treatment for substance use and medications for mental illness are interrupted or lost when caseworkers and peer support specialists cannot find those they serve. State-sanctioned, compulsive homeless encampments will drive unsheltered veterans further from the resources needed and further away from sustainable recovery, while putting the onus on our local law enforcement. Especially in the context of yesterday's annual observance of Memorial Day, it makes no sense for our leaders to pass laws that criminalize those who have given up so much for the freedoms we enjoy. Our General Assembly members would serve their communities more effectively by investing in solutions that have been proven to work and are cost effective.
Style Blueprint
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Style Blueprint
Meet Memphis Author Martha Park
Share with your friends! Pinterest LinkedIn Email Flipboard Reddit In her debut book, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, Martha Park explores the intersections of faith, climate change, and motherhood with an illustrator's eye and a storyteller's heart. She joined us to discuss her journey from freelance writer and illustrator to published author. We're thrilled to introduce this week's FACE of Memphis! Pin Could you tell us a little about your background? I grew up a United Methodist preacher's kid in Memphis. We lived in a series of church-owned parsonages for most of my childhood, and then settled into the Cooper-Young neighborhood before moving to a house near the University of Memphis. I went to college at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, where I double-majored in Studio Art and Creative Writing. After grad school in Virginia, my husband and I moved to Memphis, hoping to be closer to family. (We bought the house next to my parents', so we are very close!) We hoped to start a family of our own. Can you give us a brief overview of your career? I received a Master of Fine Arts from Hollins University. (I decided to go to Hollins based solely on the fact that author Annie Dillard went to school there.) After graduation, I was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University. I've spent the last ten years working as a freelance writer and illustrator. My work has been published in places like The Guardian, Oxford American, and The Bitter Southerner, and has received fellowships and support from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Religion & Environment Story Project, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Pin You're now a published author — congratulations! What has surprised you most about the experience of putting your book into the world? It has been gratifying to experience the book moving from a very interior, private project to a shared one. It's always encouraging to know that the questions I've been exploring — often in isolation — are resonant even for readers with wildly different life experiences. Your book weaves faith, climate change, and motherhood — three deeply personal and complex themes. What moment or experience sparked the idea to explore them together in illustrated essays? In 2020, while I was stuck at home during the pandemic and pregnant with my first child, I wrote a feature story for the Bitter Southerner about people in the Florida panhandle working to save one of the world's rarest trees. It only grows along a stretch of the Apalachicola River, in an area an eccentric preacher and lawyer claimed in the 1950s. It was actually the location of the Garden of Eden. While working on that story, I realized I couldn't write the environmental story about the likely extinction of a rare tree and those working to save it, in isolation from larger questions of faith or from my own experience anticipating the birth of my son. They were all woven together. So, I wrote the story that way, and that experience really shaped all the work that came after it. Pin How did becoming a mother influence your view on climate change and your relationship with faith? Motherhood has a way of imposing a kind of dual vision; you're seeing the world with (at least) two perspectives at all times. My vision is narrowed to my children and their moment-to-moment experience of the world. At the same time, it is widened to include all children — to see the world as a vast array of people caring for and being cared for — and a broader timeline that stretches forward (and backward) generations. Children have a way of stitching you into time expansively. I think that's shaped how I think about climate change and faith. They've both become simultaneously more intimate and more expansive. Were any essays or illustrations particularly difficult to write or draw? What made them so challenging … and rewarding? The final essay in the book is about my son's traumatic birth. In the rest of the book, my explorations are more intellectual, but the process of giving birth — and healing from birth — opened up new ways of experiencing the sacred that were deeply grounded in my body. When I decided to include the essay in the book, I was worried that readers would be thrown off by it; it's a real departure from the other essays in some ways. So, it's been rewarding to hear from readers who connect with that essay and find it to be a new entry point into the book's larger questions. Pin Living in the South comes with a distinct blend of cultural, environmental, and spiritual identity. How do your Southern roots shape your work? People often reference Flannery O'Connor's description of the South as 'Christ-haunted.' But I find the lines immediately following that famous quote even more resonant: 'Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.' I feel like my work and my perspective have been utterly formed by this place, as it has been shaped by the strange shadows of many ghosts. Nothing feels far away here. We are, as Annie Dillard wrote, on the 'fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.' What do you hope readers carry with them after reading your book? I hope readers carry with them a sense that the ordinary places where we live are deeply worth care and attention, and that questions about how to live in the world on the edge of the sacred are wells that never run dry. Pin Switching gears, where can we find you when you aren't working? I am almost always running around our neighborhood with one or more kids in tow. What is your best piece of advice? I'm not in the advice business, but I believe in heeding the creative work that calls and nourishes you, in whatever form that takes shape, especially while enmeshed in the work of parenting or caregiving. Aside from faith, family, and friends, what are three things you can't live without? I could probably live without gardening, reading, and physical therapy, but I wouldn't want to. Pin This article contains product affiliate links. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links. ********** For more creative and inspiring FACES, check out our archives! About the Author Gaye Swan A freelance writer, mom of twins, avid traveler, and local foodie, Gaye loves meeting new people and bringing their stories to life.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Jesus has been betrayed again. This time by Oklahoma legislators
As I wrote this on Maundy Thursday, preparing for our communion service and Good Friday, I could not help but feel that Jesus has been betrayed again — not by a disciple in a garden, but by legislators at the Oklahoma Capitol. Earlier today, the House passed Concurrent Resolution 1013, a proclamation declaring 'Christ is King.' As a United Methodist pastor, I believe that phrase deeply — but only within the context of faith, worship and the countercultural way of life Jesus calls us to. When the state takes those sacred words upon its lips, they are transformed into something else entirely. What was once a confession of worship becomes a political power play. What was once a theological truth becomes a civil decree. And in doing so, the government steps into the dangerous territory of Christian nationalism. Let me be clear: This resolution is unconstitutional, anti-democratic and theologically misguided. It is Holy Week — the most sacred time in the Christian calendar. On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem not on a warhorse but a donkey, rejecting displays of imperial power. He was crucified by the Roman government — the very kind of earthly authority this resolution claims to represent. When offered political dominion in the wilderness, he refused. When Pilate asked him, 'Are you the king of the Jews?' Jesus replied, 'You say that I am. My kingdom is not of this world.' He did not claim earthly kingship for himself. It was attributed to him by others. The sign above his head on the cross declaring him 'King of the Jews' was written in mockery. So why are Oklahoma legislators using their power to confer earthly authority on Christ — something Christ himself rejected? More: The entire strategy for education in Oklahoma is failing. It is wrong and unjust | Pastor HCR 1013 betrays the Christ who refused power and domination. In Mark 10, Jesus gathers his disciples and says, 'You know that among the gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant… For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.' Jesus never crowned himself king. The title he uses is 'servant.' His vision is an upside-down one, where the first are last and the last are first. The only throne Jesus ever sat on was a cross. His kingdom looks less like the Capitol dome and more like foot-washing, shared meals, and solidarity with the poor and oppressed. Our state, however, often operates in contradiction to this vision. As noted from the House floor today: The first bill our state passed established segregation. Our history is filled with the mistreatment of Black, Native, Latine, Asian, Pacific Islander and Middle Eastern communities. We criminalized 'the least of these,' rather than cared for the unhoused. We continue to underfund education, and our outcomes lag behind the rest of the nation. If Christ truly were king here, our priorities would look radically different. As my friend and church member, Rep. Andy Fugate, said on the House floor: 'Instead of spending our time defunding the principles of Jesus, let's spend it defending the principles of Jesus.' More: Rabbi: 'I am deeply offended' by the Legislature's resolution proclaiming 'Christ is King' The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion — including the freedom not to have a specific religion declared on your behalf by the state. This resolution violates that freedom. It elevates one faith above all others, disregarding the rich religious and cultural diversity of Oklahoma: Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Indigenous spiritualities, atheists — and even Christians like me who see this proclamation as a distortion of our faith. It sends a chilling message: You are not fully Oklahoman unless you accept our version of religion. That is not democracy. That is theocracy. That is Christian nationalism. And it is not the gospel. This is a kairos moment — a time to reject Christian nationalism. It confuses patriotism with discipleship and turns the crucified Christ into a mascot for the empire. HCR 1013 fits this mold exactly. As a pastor, I reject it. Not because I don't believe Christ is King — but because I do. If Christ is King, then Caesar is not. If Christ is King, no Legislature can legislate it — we must live it. If Christ is King, let us love our enemies and welcome the stranger. If Christ is King, let the hungry be fed and the prisoner cared for. If Christ is King, let justice roll down and the oppressed go free. Oklahoma doesn't need symbolic resolutions. We need spiritual integrity. We need moral courage. We need a Christianity that humbles itself to serve — not exalts itself to dominate. Because Christ may be King — but he rules from a cross, not a Capitol. The Rev. Adam Young is the senior pastor at Sunny Lane United Methodist Church in Del City and lives in Edmond with his wife and four boys who attend public schools. This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma legislators proclaim 'Christ is King,' a political power play
