Domestic Poverty

We're excited to welcome Jeremiah Damir Bašurić as a Do Justice columnist! Jeremiah lives in Edmonton, where he pastors a multi-cultural Reformed church plant called mosaicHouse Church, works at The Mustard Seed, and hikes with his wife Sarah. 

Ever since I realized my name was in the Bible, I wanted to get acquainted with the book and the prophet Jeremiah. I read Jeremiah 4:23-27 the other day looking for inspiration:  

About 700 women die each year in the U.S. as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications.¹ This rate of pregnancy-related death is higher in the United States than the rates in other industrialized nations.

But when the time came for her to leave the community, she didn’t want to leave. Not only did she not want to deliver alone far from her community, but she also had 5 young children that she didn’t want to leave behind. I remember the daily stress of worrying that she would deliver the babies before leaving the community.

This is the second post in Pro-Mama, a 4-part series reflecting on God's gift of life in the first 1000 days of a baby's life--from conception to age 2.

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She may not be laying down at the threshold of the local abortion clinic. She might not be found in heated political debates on social media.

It’s been quite the year! Thanks for reading and learning along with us, as we wrestled with faith and justice with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other (Karl Barth).

Here are the top Do Justice articles (ranked by top pageviews) that got you thinking and acting in 2018: 

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

                    -Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the doctor who brought attention to the impact that Flint’s water was having on children, opens her book with these lines from Dr. Seuss.

In my previous post about gentrification, I established a simple premise. Any development and revitalization of  a neighborhood that leads to the involuntary displacement of already existing people, history, and culture is inequitable, and antithetical to God’s desire for wholeness and flourishing for all of his creation.

One spring I participated in a two and a half day silent retreat where I picked up two books by Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet and The Jesus Creed. In my reading and reflection times, I learned some principles of applying the stories of the Bible to my story and I reflected on possible God moments in my life that I was missing. As the Bible tells stories about who God is and what he has done, it can also help us learn how he is present in our lives, every day and into the future.

Can you imagine escaping a dangerous situation and finally beginning a new life in Canada...but doing so with $10,000 in debt, before you even started language classes or enrolled your children in school? For more than two decades, Canada was the only country in the world to charge refugees interest on their travel loans. For a nation claiming to welcome refugees, this sent mixed messages.

"God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:27-28)