Patton Dodd

Sometimes when I’m reading a book, I find myself wanting to assign it to people. This week, while reading Robert Chao Romero’s Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, I wanted to grab every Christian I’ve ever known, get them in a room together, and talk about the contents of this book for hours on end. Reading it was like repopulating my brain, casting new characters into the story of Christianity in the Americas. You thought Christianity was one thing. This book is here to tell you that it’s another.

I’ve read more than my share of theology and religious history. For a while, I was an academic in religious studies, then a journalist covering religion, especially American Christianity. For years, out of a mix of professional habit and (sometimes morbid) fascination, I read basically all of the key Christian publications, from Christianity Today and Christian Century to First Things and Sojourners and Charisma and Patheos and On Faith and more. I contributed some writing of my own and edited lots more. 

All that reading built a choir of voices in my head. Had you asked me, I would have told you that the choir had some racial diversity. Mostly white, sure, but with significant Black voices inflecting the sound and the story. I always made a point of reading African American literature and theology and talking to Black pastors and scholars. 

But reading Brown Church, I realize just how much of the story I was missing. And it’s a terribly exciting and important story, one rich with its own theological insights and complex experiences of the faith. Sure, I knew about Gustavo Gutiérrez and Liberation Theology, and also César Chavez, but until now I probably would have placed them at the beginning of the story of Latina/o Christianity. In Chao’s telling, these are latter-day saints, and much more comes after them, too. 

Chao’s chapters are a roll call, a half-millennium’s worth of padres, nuns, activists, scholars, and ministers of all kinds working and living in the borderlands, literally and figuratively. Bartolomé de Las Casas. Garcilaso de La Vega. Padre Antonio José Martínez. Oscar Romero. Franciso Olazabal. And many more—as I say, the book is a roll call, a cast of characters. Some of the names are foundational, and they belong in the story of North and Central American Christianity along with Jonathan Edwards or Frederick Douglass. Some are more minor figures, but I’m surprised never to have encountered them the way I encountered, say, Oral Roberts or Aimee Semple McPherson. 

One more comment: Chao’s perspective throughout is rather odd—a mix of academic, activist, and pastoral. That’s part of what I like about the book, actually. He includes a note in the introduction about his positionality: “I am an Asian-Latino or ‘Chino-Chicano,’ historian, lawyer, and evangélico pastor.” He teaches Chicano studies and Asian American studies at UCLA and ministers to activists on the side. “I have lived my life in the in-between,” he says, and he expresses in-between-ness in his style. The book reads like a monograph at times, then like critical race theory. He sermonizes here and there, rallies the reader to gospel imperatives. He delivers quick historical overviews. He breaks into poetry. In the end, all of this is in keeping with Chao’s whole project: “Brown should be considered a fluid ’space,’” he writes, “…a liminal social, legal, political, and cultural space.” His book exists in that same space, and some may find it cacophonous. But Chao is giving us a fuller chorus.

A quick reflection on Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing

I’ve read my fair share of books and articles about paying attention. It’s been one way of dealing with my own inability to cultivate the attentive life that I long for: one where I’m less tempted by Twitter, where I don’t need browser extensions to block distracting sites, where I don’t refresh news sites a (few) dozen times a day or make sure my podcast queue is fully stacked before running errands. One where I enjoy the silence, see my surroundings, and remember how to stare.

I’m not sure Jenny Odell’s book is the one that’ll break the spell of distraction, and at times I wasn’t sure it was working for me at all: There’s a whiff of pretense running through these pages, and one could make accusations of privilege. Odell’s attentive life involves a lot of time in museums and bird-watching, and it is free of children or even very many coworkers and neighbors.

And yet. Every time I was tempted to put it down, the next section would draw me back in. I was up well past midnight finishing this book, because Odell’s case for the attentive life is ultimately powerful and deeply ethical, and it warrants, well, full attention.

Paying attention, Odell says, is an active of resistance against a consumer-capitalist system that is using awesome tools against us–the algorithms and persuasive design systems that keep learning how to draw us in and keep us coming back. But Odell is “less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than…in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.” She calls us to “ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.”

I don’t think the term “God” or even “spirit” shows up in this book, but the life Odell is describing is one I’d call religious: devoted to inward healing and caring for others, built of habits of restraint and intentional acts, embracing the responsibility to build a more just world. (Her models include Thomas Merton, and Wendell Berry references pop up here and there.)

Odell argues that the attentive life is not one that abandons all digital media, but it’s “a commitment to live in a permanent refusal.” That’s a higher call. I find it easy to forget about Facebook and Twitter when I delete the apps or deactivate my accounts. What’s tough is to develop practices of highly engaged, thoughtful use; of limiting the space I give to them each day, of constantly questioning what these tools are for and where they belong in my life. The apps make it tough: they are learning robots designed to attract and distract us. Every time we use them, we are helping them learn.

The stakes here are high. Odell shows how what we pay attention to renders our world. Think of how your brain responds to buying a new make and model of a car. Once you’re in your Jeep Cherokee, you see Jeep Cherokees all over the streets. Or think of the difference between walking through a new city by yourself and walking through it with a tour guide or someone who lives there and knows it well. Your attention is trained by these experiences, and attention doesn’t just change what you know–it changes what you can see. As Odell quotes William James (writing in 1918!): “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

(Aside: Why do high rates of poverty and inequity persist in our affluent society? Because only those things which we notice shape our minds.)

Wait, that’s not an aside. It’s the main reason any of this matters. Unless we can train our attention, and invite others to train their attention, we don’t have a chance of building a more just world. The robots have no interest in the quality of the world we’re building together.

This story happened a while ago. I’ve changed names and other details.

Christopher Rodriguez tells me he’s just trying to maintain. He tends bar on the weekends, he says, but never gets many shifts and isn’t sure how long he’ll even have the job. I suspect he’s asking for advice, so I begin to venture it, but he waves me off. “I ain’t about all that. Just trying to maintain,” he says, a second time.

“I’m on that SSI,” he adds—Social Security Income. He’s trying to ensure that he doesn’t lose welfare benefits by making too much money. He thinks about job training programs sometimes, but the mere thought starts a mental tailspin, and he’s trying to maintain. He’s got a decent rhythm now, days and weeks of good behavior turning into months. How long can he keep this up?

Christopher and I both have sons on the same Little League baseball team. The team is practicing on a warm April night, and Christopher and I are standing in the dugout. We don’t know each other from Adam, and before now we’d never ventured past small talk. I’d been curious about him, though—he stood out from the rest of us suburban dads.

Christopher is a good five or six inches shorter than I am, but built like a bull. If you saw him walking toward you on the sidewalk, your spine might stiffen. His resting face could be mistaken for a glower, sharpened by a dark, triangular beard. His left arm is covered in what you’d think is a sleeve tattoo until you give it a closer look—it is not planned art, but a congealed history of nights and weekends, plus, as I learned, a stint in prison.

Earlier in the season while trying to break the ice with Christopher and another tattooed dad, I asked them where they got their tattoos. “I’m in the market,” I said. “Looking for some good local talent.” (There has to be a cool way to inquire about local tattoo talent, but I do not know what it is.)

Christopher took me in for a couple beats, then: “Shit, man, no fucking clue,” he said, then added, “I’m not saying I got mine in the joint, but….” He laughed. I didn’t know what to say. We had stared for a moment just past each other’s shoulders.

But on this night, all of a sudden, we’re past the awkward stares and small talk. I had asked one question—”So, how are things going for you?”—and for some reason he’s really, really answering me.

I learn that Christopher is 32 and that he’s on a good run—he has been out of jail for a while, and he’s living clean. Things are balanced in his life at the moment, and while he knows he needs to make more money, get him and his son out of his parents’ house, he cannot not chance pushing too hard: he has to maintain.

Christopher is paying down a restitution—he owes the State of Texas $100 per month as a penalty for a crime he won’t disclose. That $100/month in restitution is his main financial priority, and when it is done a new door will open: “Then I can help coach.” He gestures toward the field where his son is playing.

“You mean you can help coach baseball?”

He’s been talking nonstop for five minutes, but this question brings him up short. Christopher looks down, fights back tears. I sneak a peek at the other parents.

“You can’t coach without a background check,” he says. His son plays football in the fall, and “I don’t know much about baseball, but man … football? I could play.” Christopher bounces on his heels a bit, anticipating. He claps his hands together. Once he can clear a background check, he won’t stand on the sidelines talking to parents like me.

He looks up at the sky for a moment, muttering to himself. His eyes brighten: “Oh shit, that’s right, I’ll be able to coach this next season!” Then his eyes fade: “No, wait. I still owe $1200.” He does the math again. “I guess it’ll be next fall.” He falls silent for a moment. “Twelve more months.” Sigh. “I can do that.”

We start talking about extended family, which Christopher just calls “family.” He doesn’t understand my situation—my wife and I live here with just our kids and no other family anywhere in Texas. The in-laws are in one city, siblings in a couple others. Christopher tells me he can’t relate to that. For Christopher, it’s all family. I say I envy him, and he laughs. He keeps talking about “Rodriguez” like it’s is a disease, or a drug. “You can’t get rid of the Rodriguez … They’ll always be Rodriguez.”

Christopher’s dad beat him with a belt all the time, he tells me. That’s the same dad he lives with now—I sometimes see him in the stands at the baseball games. I ask Christopher if he and his dad are okay now. He looks at me like he doesn’t understand what I’m asking. I put it bluntly: “Well, he beat you with a belt while you were growing up, and now you’re living with him—I mean, how is all that?”

Christopher stares at me for a moment. He changes the subject.

A little while later, Christopher tells me about the time he beat his ex-wife and she called the cops. He tells me this like he’s describing ordering a sandwich—it’s the most matter of fact thing in the world. When the cops came, he got away with a warning: “If you kill your wife, you’ll be going away for a long time,” they told him.

His ex-wife has 4 or 5 more kids from a couple different guys. Christopher says that all of them have been put into foster care system now. He’s not sure what she did to lose them all.

When he and his parents sought custody of Christopher’s boy, Christopher had to appear in court and answer a lot of questions about his life. He said it was hard to talk about himself in front of all those people—it was nothing like talking to me, right now. He’d never been so scared, he says. For the second time, he fights back tears.

All of the above, I get in one 30-minute conversation with Christopher while we watch our sons do defensive drills and shag balls.

The baseball season goes on. Our team is terrible—we eek out a couple wins midway through the season, but the squad is full of first-time players, and mostly we watch the other team score runs. Christopher and I stop small-talking, stop talking at all. He nods at me at practices and games; I nod back. He starts standing further apart, and then, with a few games left in the season, stops showing up. His son gets rides from Christopher’s dad.

I try to track him down. No one I know knows him or anyone he knows.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a guy here in San Antonio who houses refugee women and children—about 15 at a time, usually from Central America, on an ongoing basis as they filter through this town after being released from detention. The refugees come virtually every day, and are dropped off at the local Greyhound station or at the airport. This guy has been trying to receive them as well as he’s able for a couple years now, and he has learned a lot about what to do, what not to do, how to work with ICE, how to set these women and children up to leave here with as much internal stability as possible. He’s implementing all sorts of ideas to help them deal with their trauma and the trauma of their fellow refugees.

Other folks are connected to his work, like a nun who sits at the Greyhound bus station most days and receives refugees as they are dropped off, and a pro-bono lawyer who spends as much of her time as she can helping people navigate immigration law. They, in turn, are connected to informal networks and various organizations pouring lots of time and energy and money into caring for these most vulnerable people.

This, too, is happening. People like this are stepping into the problems you’re always hearing about, and they’re doing vital work that never makes it to your screen(s).

You’ll never hear about their work on Fox News or CNN or MSNBC. They don’t have a presence on Twitter or Facebook. But they’re here, on the ground, doing really hard work everyday on behalf of desperate strangers. Why? Simply because the work needs to be done.

They’re not just here, of course. People are taking it upon themselves to address these challenges in El Paso, Arizona, San Diego, and all across the southern border.

We have a drone-level view of this story that has dominated headlines all year, the story of our immigration policy and ICE and family separation and detention centers. Mostly, the stories we hear are the ones that play well in our political theater. But get closer to the ground, and you’ll see that there’s a lot more detail to this story, with more characters in the mix, including people who sit at bus stations and border fences, and receive people, and offer them food and water and shelter and counseling and transportation. Free of charge, with no ulterior motive, just a deep sense of calling to repair something in this broken world.

This, too, is happening. This, too, is part of what’s going on. The tragedies are larger than the helpers. But the helpers are not overcome.

Churches in Denver, Colorado, Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. are turning unused space—empty church buildings, undeveloped parcels, old parking lots—into affordable housing solutions. Recent stories about what’s happening in these cities call this a nationwide trend, and I suspect that’s overstated, but I suggest we keep calling it that in hopes that it becomes true.

How much land do churches own nationwide? How much of that land is in cities with an affordable housing crisis? Think of all the old, aging church buildings with declining memberships—they’re everywhere, and in some cities they’re becoming bars, climbing gyms, high-end condos. But some congregations are using a better economic imagination.

In downtown Denver, St. John’s Cathedral sold an old parking lot for $1 to a nonprofit that built 50 affordable housing units. That inspired the local Interfaith Alliance to pull 20 churches together to “transform their unused land into housing with a higher purpose.” They looked at county data and found more than 5000 acres of unused land owned by churches around Denver. Statewide, there’s even more—down in El Paso County (home to church-dense Colorado Springs) there are 10,000 acres of development land.

There are lots of ways this could go, and it sounds like the Interfaith Alliance is getting lots of advice and being as creative as possible. Some churches are selling their buildings are market rate and using the cash for housing efforts, some are running their own properties, some are giving the land away.

This work is absolutely vital in one of the hottest housing markets in the country—more and more families are facing fewer and fewer housing options. More than 50% of Denver renters pay more than 30% of their income in rent, and last summer, the average price of sold single-family homes was over $500,000.

The housing affordability problem hits far beyond the hottest markets, however. “Millions of low-income Americans are paying 70 percent or more of their incomes for shelter,” reports Glenn Thrush at the New York Times, and our federal and state responses to these challenges are slow, stubborn, and often inept.

Here in Texas, I am certain there is lots of opportunity for churches to get creative about our own brewing housing crisis. (The Texas Tribune has a new series on the issue.) I saw a recent annual report from the Rio Texas United Methodist Conference, and concerns about the real estate of their empty churches—mostly in the “inner city”—took up a significant portion of the report. Also, last year at Folo Media when we were trying to build a comprehensive list of San Antonio congregations, the county data we pulled showed land holdings that far exceeded the number of churches in the area. It wasn’t clear how that land is being used, but I wonder if congregations around here are having the same conversation that is happening in Denver, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

Here’s hoping a trend really is underway, and that congregations want to be trendy.

I’ve been thinking about writing a book about my mom for over a decade. She is an extraordinary person who lived a life of struggle with remarkable integrity and even joy. I think her story would do a lot of people a lot of good.

For a long time, I told myself I wasn’t working on that book because she was living with cancer and I did not want to be looking backward at her life as if her life was about to be over. I wanted to keep hoping we’d have her another 20 years.

I don’t have that excuse now. Since she passed in February, I’ve published one article—about how prayer was her life’s work—and yesterday I posted to Medium this short story about anger and the things people say when someone you love dies and a trail run I took on the day of her death.

Both times I’ve written about her, it feels a little like I’m spending time with her. That makes me want to write a lot more . . . and not write any more at all. I love thinking about her, of course, but to think about her is to remember again that she is gone. Choosing to sit with that loss regularly might be more than I can commit to.

But I do enjoy spreading the gospel of her life:

She was good at loving things. Not just people, but delights of all kinds. She’d exclaim over a bite of pie — My law, that is good! She’d thrill to a rush of snowy air barreling through a door — Polly Wolly, that is cold! She’d revel in the small actions of my children or the everyday insights of my wife — I do believe that is the sweetest thing I have ever heard! I called or texted her when any good thing happened, because her delight upgraded my delights. Her joy added to my joy, like a contagion.

I stood at the top of that hill and pretended for a moment that I did not know what I was feeling instead of anger — but I knew. I knew even as it welled up within me and pushed everything else aside: it was joy. I could almost hear Mom sharing it with me.

Conor Friedersdorf:

Intervening millennia have offered no shortage of opportunities to care for strangers who are hungry, thirsty, sick, or otherwise destitute, rather than turning them away. Christian charities are often at the forefront of such efforts. The UN Refugee Agency now estimates 68.5 million displaced people worldwide, including 25.4 million refugees—roughly half children—and 3.1 million asylum seekers.