violence on Injury

God of love—Father, Son and Holy Spirit: You loved us before we ever knew You. Give us such a deep love for You, that we can see the world as You see it, feel the compassion You feel, and be a people ...

Good and Gracious Lord, You hold us in the palm of Your strong hand, working all things for our good and to Your glory. There’s no place we can go that escapes Your notice and is hidden from Your lovi...

I did some of my Clinical Pastoral Education Units in Gastonia. One of the units that I served was the Emergency Department. If there was an incident that was suspected to be gang related, they would ...

Just after leaving a training session on the ice in Detroit, Michigan, on January 6, 1994, Nancy Kerrigan was assaulted in the leg by a man wielding a telescopic baton. Television cameras captured the...

Victims of oppression & injustice don't need our spasm of passion…they need our legs & lungs of endurance.

I hold that in every situation of injustice and oppression, the Christian—who cannot deal with it by violence—must make himself completely a part of it as representative of the victims.

All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.

The one category where we could not see where the body of Christ had very much capacity to respond was where the poor were the victims of violence.

On a Saturday in September, 2013, one of the most deadly terrorist attacks in history took place in an upscale mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Four Gunman, part of the Al-Qaeda affiliate al Shabab, took the l...

Nothing good ever comes of violence.

To be struck on the right cheek, in that world, almost certainly meant being hit with the back of the right hand. That’s not just violence, but an insult: it implies that you’re an inferior, perhaps a...

Part of the spirit dies a little each time it’s asked to carry more than its weight in terror, violence, and betrayal.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.

The first thing to notice is that violence is intentional. For example, one of the most brutal forms of violence affecting millions of poor women and girls in our world is sex trafficking. Lured a...

The problem has never been the ways that victims don’t tell, so much as it has been that some victims aren’t seen as valuable to protect.

We may be “connected,” but we’re lonely, we’re isolated from each other, and we’ve become afraid of each other. That fear has produced acts of violence that are becoming all too common.

In his excellent book, Just Courage , founder and CEO of the International Justice Mission, Gary Haugen articulates some of the realities behind the systemic oppression of the poor around the world...

Unlike hunger or homelessness or illiteracy, if you try to attack the problem, it will attack you. Violence fights back. One of the places we have seen this most starkly is in IJM’s fight against slav...

The skills have been lost of being present for and in another, and what remains is mistrust and violence.

Bullying has been around as long as children have lived in groups. Often, adults minimize or ignore it, reasoning: "we all have to go through it—I did, and I'm ok" or even "it build...

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

We are again in a moment of intense anger, fear, and sorrow. We've been here too often, lately. In September 2025, prominent activist Charlie Kirk was killed in front of a crowd in Utah. This ca...

One of my memories as a teenager was hearing about the murder of Katherine Susan Genovese at Kew Gardens in New York City. Early in the morning on March 13, 1964, she was attacked by an assailant on h...

We were created to communicate, to speak truth fully to one another, so that we might be members of one another. To be members of one another means we must learn to trust one another. Trust, like trut...

Jesus offers a new sort of justice, a creative, healing, restorative justice. The old justice found in the Bible was designed to prevent revenge running away with itself. Better an eye for an eye and ...

Anger is not in itself sinful, but...it may be the occasion for sin. The issue of self-control is the question of how we deal with anger. Violence, tantrums, bitterness, resentment, hostility, and eve...

The British romantic poet Lord Byron (George Gordon) grew up with the disability of clubfoot, which kept him from engaging in many of the activities and joys of childhood. He was nevertheless, a perso...

In 2015, the Guardian reported that 1,134 people were killed by police in the United States. And that number is only an estimate because it is still not mandatory to report these deaths to the Justice...

Notes on prayer: This prayer is designed for a leader and a congregation, but it could be further divided so that the Leader/People response sections are "voice 1" and "voice 2." ...

Notes on prayer: This lament can be used as prayers of the people, but can be adapted for other uses as well. It is designed to be responsive, but it would also work if prayed in unison. Leader: ...