“I want you all to know that you are now in an arrestable situation ... ” These are the words I and 30 others were told by an NAACP lawyer as we attempted to block an entrance to one of the terminals in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. I was there with fellow organizers, activists, and seminarians to protest the airport’s process of detaining specific travelers of color as a result of Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration.

In February of 2014, I delivered a sermon to my Southern Baptist church, sharing that I had changed my mind on same sex marriage. I no longer believed that Scripture taught that it was wrong to be in a gay or lesbian relationship.

Contextual theology is the idea that one’s social location must be taken into account in how one understands God and reads Scripture. When social locations change, the questions change. When questions change, the theology changes.

As a college student, I was a member of a fundamentalist, cultic strain of white evangelicalism that took pride in differentiating itself from the supposed “cultural baggage of Korean and black churches”. When I started to question some of our tradition’s toxic teachings around gender, race, and sexuality — violent, colonial relics that withered much of our ethics and discipleship — I was shunned from my community in a very painful and traumatic way. For years, I felt unsure of how I could possibly be a Christian again, and I was afraid to enter faith spaces, though I still felt a need for Jesus-shaped spiritual nourishment.

In the midst of my tears, the image of the patriarch sitting in the clouds peering down and handing me an F flips to another image.

“Today we are at day 356 of detention. August 29th is his one-year anniversary since he was picked up by ICE,” Montha Chum says of her brother, Chamroeun Phan, who she calls Shorty. “Not much has changed, it’s just the Board of Immigration that has to make a decision.”

“June was already 30 when she immigrated to America. She was married in China and moved here because of her husband. She wasn’t working when she decided to send her son to China, but she wanted to learn English, attend college, and go to nursing school. All that meant she would have homework and need to spend a lot of time studying.

“Your cousin Smriti told us that we were less like husband and wife and more like best friends when we stayed with her in Delhi,” my mother told me after my parents’ most recent visit to India. “That’s sweet!” I exclaimed, surprised at this sentimentality from my cousin.

It was a Thursday morning when I heard. I had been getting ready for work. I was looking forward to the weekend because my wife, Ellen, and I were going to a friend’s wedding in Minnesota. We planned to visit my parents while we were in the state. In preparation, I gathered a few things to bring with us, including some enlargements of our wedding photos for my mother and a book for my dad.

Eddy Zheng is often invited to community organizations or churches to share his redemptive story from prison to re-entry. It is incredible to hear how much Eddy has changed in his lifetime amidst daunting circumstances and the length of time he has had to fight for his freedom. But in certain church settings, after giving his talk, Eddy has been met with distrust, rather than open arms.

I am in Columbia, Missouri, sitting in a beautiful sanctuary with rows upon rows of chairs filled with people. Voices, instruments, and spirits blend together to create the ideal Sunday worship. People are standing, some lifting their hands, while others are silently taking it all in.

I grew up watching white people on TV. White families on popular sitcoms always interested me because of how different they were culturally from my own family culture. I often asked my mom why we couldn’t have casseroles for dinner or why we didn’t go on family vacations.

My family arrived in Houston, Texas after fleeing Cambodia and Vietnam in the mid-70s. We had lived in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand, but it was difficult to cope with having to begin our lives again in a new land. My father, in particular, had an especially hard time. A former soldier in Lon Nol’s army, he had a violent temper that often meant trouble for my older siblings.

I arrived late for the opening worship of a conference for second-generation (and beyond) Korean American pastors and church leaders. Instead of quietly sneaking into the sanctuary, I found myself hesitating to go in.

There’s a “mascot” for my music: a nocturnal creature. It is often depicted by a silhouette of a raven. A nocturnal creature is a name I’ve given myself. The mascot not only describes my nature of staying up really late at night, but also describes the focus of most of my songs: loneliness.

AROUND 2:40 A.M. on September 4, 1977, 17-year old Melvin Yu and two other members of the Joe Boys gang, all heavily armed, stormed the Golden Dragon Restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They’d been tipped off about the whereabouts of the leaders of two gangs allied against them, the Wah Ching and the Hop Sing Boys.

Dear Mommy and Deddy, Remember those months as a college senior when I told you about becoming a campus minister? We talked for hours before my graduation about joining staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

During my second year of law school, I got the last spot for a winter clinical course that allowed students to represent a prisoner with a life sentence before the Massachusetts Parole Board. The client I was paired up with for the next three months was supposed to be one of the toughest on our roster — an inmate notorious for his capricious temper, set to face his third parole hearing.

“Those affected by mass incarceration.” That could be you. That chair you’re sitting on. Where was it made? Those streets you avoid. Those people you’re afraid of. Scared of. Scared of what? And why?

I used to think that all churches should become multicultural. I openly criticized the Taiwanese immigrant church I attended, especially our English-speaking congregation, for not being diverse enough.

Oh Creator, Redeemer Sovereign Lord and Savior Where are you on this street Where I live Where you live

Before the wake began, my cousins and I watched as my mother, her older sister, and her younger brother prayed together as a family. Suddenly, my mom started to pray eloquently in our regional dialect. Something was happening; my mother didn’t generally pray publicly or spontaneously.

My soul was riveted as I read the story of Marie in Madeleine Thien’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing”. Marie was a Chinese Canadian who grew up with an absent father. The reason behind his trek back to China was a mystery — that is, until the unexpected arrival of the daughter of one of her father’s closest confidantes.

I read once about how some of the most delicious wines are grown in places with the least fertile soils. The inhospitable land forces the grape vine roots to go deeper to look for nutrients and water, and the energy in the sugars created focuses its way to the fruit, resulting in potency in flavor.

Prayer has always been a focus of my personal relationship with God and my discipleship. So much so, that as a ministry, I have spent the better part of my life helping people pray. In addition, as a created being, my own creativity has most directly been expressed in the visual arts. Being an iconographer brings the streams of prayer and painting together for me.