Wars, conflict, persecution, and climate change are causing more people to flee their homes now than at any other time since records began. The UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates there are more than 65.6 million forcibly displaced people, 22.5 million refugees and 10 million stateless
After the 2016 election, I drove twelve hours to learn more about America’s invisible political majority. In order to get there, I had to pass through hundreds of miles of forgotten stories, buried memories, unrecognized sacrifices, and rusted machinery, digging deep into the troughs
This article investigates one particular narrative of “othering and belonging,” one that brings together the historical and contemporary experience of particular communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have found it possible to work out various forms of coexistence. As we grapple with contemporary American
Read the companion piece to An Evolutionary Roadmap for Belonging and Co-Liberation. Dear Shanthi In my thirteen years working in the field of racial equity, primarily in government, colleagues from the District Attorney’s Office, the library system, and the health department brought to our
Read the companion piece: An Evolutionary Roadmap for Belonging and Co-Liberation To the reader: I was invited to contribute a piece to the journal Othering & Belonging on an emergent arts-based synthesis that I have co-created with others that speaks to the intersection of
It was October 2014, and the new Palestine Museum I was working with sent me on an assignment. I was to photograph the Palestinian village of Battir, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site under the title, “Land of Olives and Vines—Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem,
Introduction The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “othering.” In a world beset by seemingly intractable and overwhelming challenges, virtually every global, national, and regional conflict is wrapped within or organized around one or more dimension of group-based difference. Othering undergirds territorial
The US Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) may sound like a government agency, but unlike the National Endowment for the Arts, it can’t be eliminated with a pen stroke by the president. The USDAC is the nation’s only people-powered department—a grassroots action network inciting
In the first issue of this publication, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian write: “The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of ‘othering’” and “the only viable solution . . . is one involving inclusion and belongingness.” It is a simple and audacious
Marilyn Moore was working as executive director of an organization in Bridgeport, Connecticut, advocating for underserved women with breast cancer, when she began to appreciate more deeply that access to fresh fruits and vegetables simply was not available in many neighborhoods. This spurred her decision
Following the publication of the inaugural issue of Othering & Belonging, the editorial staff invited several very thoughtful colleagues to reflect on its lead article, “The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging.” The article engaged the crucial themes that spurred us to create this
As a white antiracist Catholic social ethicist trained in theology, I approach my work as mediating “between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of religion in that matrix.”1)Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, Second edition (Minneapolis: Seabury Press, [1972], 1979), xi. In other words, theology