I live a 15 minute drive from Life Care Center in Kirkland, WA, a nursing home where 81 of its 120 residents tested positive for COVID-19 and 35 people died.

Do you still insist that churches should not feel compelled to take direct action to shelter the undocumented from the violence of the state? As a minister of the Gospel, how do you justify your defense of the American project over the lives of vulnerable people who, in Howard Thurman’s phrasing, have their backs against the wall?

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.