Quick Note: This essay is late, but I’m catching up and will be following up with February’s essay very soon, and then finally March’s essay. Thank you for hanging in there with me.

This Epiphany, the lights are not gentle. They are the overhead fluorescents snapping on in a private prison where there are people crowded in cages on the floor.

The church calendar says this is the season of revelation. Fine. Let us have some revelation.

Amos is not subtle. He addresses a nation of devout, prosperous, festival-attending people who believe God is pleased with them. The music is excellent. The offerings are on time. The courts are corrupt, the poor are being ground into dust, and God, who is apparently not as manageable as previously assumed, rejects the whole operation, the entire shebang. Take your songs away from me, God says. I will not listen to the melody of your harps. Let justice roll down like waters. Not trickle. Roll.

Reading Amos in January 2026 is not theoretical. It is a mirror held up to a country where immigration enforcement has become a killing operation. Say their names like what they are: a list that should not exist, a list that actually has thousands of entries of non-violent, law-abiding people being ground to dust.

Renée Nicole Good. Alex Pretti. Keith Porter Jr. Ruben Ray Martinez. Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres. Geraldo Lunas Campos. Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. Parady La. Victor Manuel Diaz. Heber Sánchez Domínguez. Nurul Amin Shah Alam. Aliya Rahman. Kaden Rummler. Britain Rodriguez. D’Iris Jackson, six months old. Liam Conejo Ramos, five years old.

(Apologies for any mispronunciations.)

This list is in no way comprehensive and does not count all of the people taken, killed, injured, or terrorized by forces working outside of due process. The latest data indicates almost 70,000 people are in custody, 73% of whom have no criminal convictions.

The government has language for all of this. Enforcement operations. Presumed suicide. Courtesy ride. Targeted stops. Less-lethal methods.

Amos has different language. In chapter five alone: I hate, I despise your festivals. Your solemn assemblies are a stench to me. That is not a measured man. That is barely contained fury, disciplined into prophecy, aimed with precision at the people doing the harm and the people calling themselves faithful while it happens.

I have been sitting with fury for months. I have also been making signs for twenty-five years — ink and brushes, cardboard, bedsheets when someone needs a banner. You work with what you have, as the flawed person you are right now. The rage and the work are not separate things.

James Cone refuses distance as well. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he forces Christian readers to confront what crucifixion was: state execution, public and humiliating, meant to terrorize. He places the cross alongside the lynching tree and refuses the comfort of metaphor. If we, as Christians, follow someone executed by the state as a threat to order, then we cannot feign shock when the state defines new threats and acts accordingly. Neutrality becomes a choice.

Wendell Berry writes from the soil rather than the scaffold, but the logic is similar. In Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, he traces how extraction becomes a governing ethic: land reduced to yield, labor reduced to cost, community reduced to inefficiency. Once efficiency outranks relationship, harm becomes administrative. The damage is filed, processed, absorbed. Violence rarely begins as spectacle. It begins as paperwork.

Taken together, Amos and Cone and Berry leave very little room for moral insulation.

And yet insulation is exactly what I practiced in January.

This is the part I would rather omit. The lights were on and I could see clearly, and I did not move. I went to work. I came home. I read the news, which arrives filtered more and more through the concerns of billionaires who have already made their arrangements. I scrolled platforms engineered for outrage and drift. I felt a rage so large it had no shape, and it did not translate into action. It translated into paralysis.

That is where Lent found me.

Coming Next FEBRUARY | Lent: Repentance & Repair

* Book of Mark

* The Fire Next Timeby James Baldwin

* Art on My Mind: Visual Politicsby bell hooks

Notes on the names above, absolutely incomplete:

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