Police Brutality and Inhumanity in Service of White Convenience

June 22, 2018 By Amy Courts

It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because each time I sit down to speak out, I feel bombarded with so much that matters that it feels impossible to focus on one thing. This past week alone has felt like a century. The American President first enacted a zero-tolerance immigration policy that not only declared certain asylum seekers “illegal,” but horrifically mandated the separation of children, including nursing infants, from their parents, and even defended the practice by... Read more

White Privilege is Getting Freebies for Loitering at Starbucks

April 18, 2018 By Amy Courts

The past week has not been great for Starbucks. Last Thursday, two black men were filmed being arrested at a Philly store and spent the evening in jail for sitting at a table and quietly waiting for a third party to arrive for a business meeting. And Monday, a black man was refused the right to use the bathroom in a Starbucks because he hadn’t purchased anything— this, immediately after a white man did the same thing, got the bathroom... Read more

The Lynching of Stephon Clark and Jesus Christ

March 29, 2018 By Amy Courts

Most of us white people cannot even imagine what a body decimated by 20 bullet holes looks like, but our Black peers are intimately acquainted with such horrors. Mike Brown’s destroyed body was left to fester in the August heat on the streets of Ferguson for four hours before the scene was processed or his body collected. Regardless of official reports, his neighbors understood he was left as a warning to witnesses who might be inclined to fight back.... Read more

White Supremacy is a White Construction for Modern White Abolitionists to Destroy

March 23, 2018 By Amy Courts

It’s been a while. Much has transpired and sparked conversation about white terrorism, white supremacy, and modern white abolitionism since last we spoke in the wake of the Valentine’s Day Parkland mass shooting. The survivors of the Stoneman Douglas massacre have fired back against the NRA, the congresspeople they’ve purchased, and the American culture of gun lust, sparking a nationwide revolution through legislation, marches, walk-outs and responsive sit-ins. They’ve persisted against threats from the highest level, while rejecting attempts to declaw their... Read more

God, We Love Our Guns

February 17, 2018 By Amy Courts

Seventeen people were slaughtered, many others injured, all survivors and neighbors indelibly traumatized yesterday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, FL. And today, lots of people are passing around articles “debunking” the 18-school-shootings-in-2018 statistic given by Everytown for Gun Safety (the number since revised to 17). All of these pieces offer excuses, caveats, defenses to otherwise normalize the presence and use of deadly weapons on and around academic institutions where innocent children earn the education promised them by the... Read more

I Am the Welfare Queen Your President Condemns

February 14, 2018 By Amy Courts

HERE IS THE TRUTH ABOUT WELFARE QUEENS LIKE ME: Collecting food stamps, unemployment checks, and medicaid insurance isn’t taking a handout. It is literally making a withdrawal from an account into which we’ve been collectively investing all our working lives. I will tell you a story to demonstrate this reality, but first let me tell you why this matters: Because for as long as I can remember, Republicans and so-called fiscal conservatives and Christians have decried social safety nets like... Read more

Six Ways To Be Love in an Economy of Hate

February 13, 2018 By Amy Courts

There is a thing I say to myself and to others, six words of truth I believe hold infinite power. A life’s motto, if you will: “Beloved, Be Loved. Beloved, Be Love.” It’s been harder to say recently because I’ve been sick, and tired, and depressed, and always, always so angry. The endless reports of promised devastation to the most vulnerable, in the form of funding cuts to social services and safety nets, coming from this administration (from Medicaid/Medicare/Social Security... Read more

God Is Love And Will Torture You Forever

January 17, 2018 By Amy Courts

Content/Trigger Warning: This post discusses stories of spiritual and psychological abuse. Tonight on my run, I listened to the latest This American Life podcast, “Chip in My Brain.” It’s about a kid named Cody who sucked at basketball, so his parents hired a private basketball coach named AJ the way parents hire piano teachers. He was a good teacher who, over six years (grades three through nine) took Cody from barely being able to dribble to being MVP of his team... Read more

Good Grief, Cheap Grace

January 9, 2018 By Amy Courts

We need to talk about how woefully unable and unwilling are humans in general and Christians in particular to suffer well and grieve deeply. We are, by evolution and/or design, creatures desperate for hope. To linger in grief or sadness, to admit that some wounds cannot be mended and some trauma never overcome, is, for many, to admit defeat. We do not know how to grieve with the grieving or groan as the Spirit does: “with groans too deep for words.”... Read more

My First Christmas Without Jesus

December 31, 2017 By Amy Courts

On December 20th, I realized that Deconstruction is a process of losing and grieving foundational beliefs that build and shape us, and that I am in the fourth stage of of that grief: Depression. The next and final stage is Acceptance, and I’m sure I don’t know how to cope with that yet. So for now I am just sad and utterly lost. I am lost in a space of not knowing how to make sense of the world, of pain... Read more