Mercy & Justice Round-Up: May Edition

By
Corrie Mitchell
may m&j roundup

What happens once we decide a child is a criminal? How are people living with disabilities able to serve the church? Is eviction a cause of poverty—or a condition of it? You’ll find articles that speak to these questions and more in this month’s Mercy & Justice Round-Up.

As always, this is a collection of content that got us thinking lately and includes a range of perspectives— some we agree with, others we might not. We hope you’ll read, listen, learn and love better with us.

  • Written by the mother of a daughter with Down syndrome, this piece in Christianity Today on “The Ministry of the Disabled” is honest, important, and seeks to reframe how we think about the ways in which people with intellectual disabilities are able to contribute to the ministry of a church.
     
  • “I can't think of a social policy that does a better job of amplifying our economic and racial inequality than our current housing policy does.” In this episode of NPR’s Fresh Air, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted, talks America’s eviction crisis and the work he’s done gathering eviction records from across the country to see causes and consequences of eviction. Bonus: check out Eviction Lab to look up your city.
     
  • Around one million kids get caught up in the criminal justice system each year. WNYC’s new podcast Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice gives some of those young people a chance to tell their stories and help us understand how they got there. It asks us to wrestle with the human consequences (disproportionately experienced by black and brown youth) of expanded and hardening criminal justice policies that began in the 1990s.
     
  • “It’s hard to love our neighbors if we don’t know our neighbors. It’s hard to know our neighbors if we don’t place ourselves, a little bit, in their shoes,” Eugene Cho says in a Q talk on "How Can We Be Agents of Peace and Reconciliation?" In this video, hear Eugene Cho, Julie Mavis, and Precious Jones share different insights on how Christians can practically bring community and caring to their neighborhoods.
     
  • The Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness recently released a report on the disparities in suspension rates for students who are homeless. It found 102 “suspension hub” middle schools where students are disciplined at extremely high rates. This interactive map allows you to see where schools in your neighborhood rank.

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Corrie Mitchell is the Marketing & Content Specialist at Hope for New York.