Watch Tax Justice For All – Week 2 (at 7:47)

In this week’s reflection we’ll explore inequities and racist policies embedded in our tax structures with individual and family scenarios. I encourage you to reflect on financial issues like college savings and student loan debt, and how they impact communities disparately. For instance, student debt and slower income growth are among drivers of the growing racial wealth gap.

More than 84% of college-educated Black households in their 30’s have student debt, up from 35% three decades ago, when today’s Baby Boomers were the same age. The amount of debt has also soared higher. Yet, many older people assume that today’s young adults have the same advantages they did and should have no problem achieving the similar success.

Questions for reflection:

1. What are privileges I enjoy in my life without fully appreciating it?
2. When have I avoided seeing or recognizing the suffering of another person?
3. How does it make me feel, emotionally and physically, to realize the depth of the disadvantage or injustice faced by another person?
4. What keeps me from recognizing God in every person?

Thank you to NETWORK Grassroots Mobilization team members Sr. Emily TeKolste, SP and Colin Martinez Longmore for leading us through these lessons. We’ll watch more together next week!

Lent calls us to repent

In Lent, God challenges us to let go of pride and recognize our limits and our dependence on the divine. When we fast during Lent, we seek to escape the limits of our experience by being in solidarity with those who go without food and feeling the pain of hunger even briefly. But we also need to recognize the limits of our perspective and life experience in other areas.

When we only experience our own background and its privileges, it’s easy to assume that everyone is like us. In many ways, I had to become a social worker providing direct service in the county jail to realize what I had taken for granted growing up as a middle class white woman in Ohio. Those early years as a social worker, and then as an educator, formed and shaped me to be a better woman religious, social worker, and educator who could name and understand her privilege. Pope Francis preaches integral ecology, which is the recognition that we are all interconnected. This recognition should extend to our neighbors we can’t see. Especially those pushed into the margins in ways we don’t understand and are disadvantaged by our very laws and policies.