Bekah McNeel is a freelance journalist living in San Antonio. She reports on the intersection of faith and early childhood for Sojourners. In addtion, she reports on education, immigration, and religion and has been published with Christianity Today, Texas Monthly, and Texas Tribune. She is the author of Bringing Up Kids When Church Lets You Down: A Guide for Parents Questioning Their Faith, from Eerdmans. She can be found on Twitter at @BekahMcneel and on her blog at www.bekahmcneel.com.
Posts By This Author
Family Separation Is the Latest Eruption in an Ongoing Emergency
Undocumented immigrant families walk from a bus depot to a respite center after being released from detention in McAllen, Texas, July 26, 2018. REUTERS/Loren Elliott
Over the past four months, news from the border has chronicled the stories of families detained and separated — many of them seeking asylum from gang violence in Central America. Children as young as 8 months have been taken from their parents and sent across the country to children’s shelters, privately run detention centers, and, some, to foster families. Now, 20 days after a court-imposed deadline, more than 550 children still have not been returned to their parents, at least 300 of whom have been deported.
Pastoring a Purple Evangelical Congregation Amid a Politically Charged Humanitarian Crisis
Isabela, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, hugs her 17-year-old daughter Dayana outside a federal contracted shelter in Brownsville, Texas, shortly after being reunited with her following their separation at the U.S.-Mexico border. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Chad Belew, pastor of The Arsenal, a non-denominational church south of downtown San Antonio, understands the pressure to keep a low profile on political issues or run the risk of alienating his congregation. But he also believes that silence is deadly, spiritually speaking. He quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”