We drove west through Ohio on I-70 towards Columbus, my dad in the passenger seat and my mom in the backseat trying to sleep, asking if I could turn off the music. The landscape was preternaturally flat, any hint of elevation change smoothed away by prehistoric glaciers. Monochrome fields merged with the horizon. Forests of apocalypse-black trees stood beneath a sky the color of wet newspaper.

Exactly 50 years ago, the identity “Asian American” was seized as a call to action, to resistance against oppression and solidarity with Third World liberation movements. Today, it is almost only a census label. Fifty years ago, the world was in upheaval, with the civil rights movement, Third World revolutions, and decolonization.

I don’t read dystopias. Not until now, that is. It might be because dystopias can be too grim or too cynical. I’ve heard from way too many people that after the election, they’ve foregone reading dystopian novels because it is just too real. And it’s true; there is already too much death around us.

Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019) would have had just the right words for a time like this. Her death is doubly cruel in robbing us of one of our foremost poet-theologians, one who could gaze into deep voids and tremendous griefs and from them craft creeds that could breathe for us when we could not. Rachel exuded an incredible influence on contemporary Christian belief and practice.