This is the 2nd half of my blog post last week on White Supremacy. It is also a follow up to my blog post a year and a half called Op0ression is bad, now what?

As we think about what it means to be an ally and look at the continuing legacy of white supremacist Christianity, the Beattitudes in Matthew and Luke have a lot too offer us.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a day when we appropriately focus a lot on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Christianity and the prophetic witness of the movement he led against racism and white supremacy.

We sometimes forget that most of the white people who Dr. King challenged were Christians.

This New Year's Eve I went to a circus. It was hosted by Fellowship of Hope in Elkhart, Ind., and featured performers from their community, local artists and Servants of the Street, a drug and rehabilitation ministry on the south side of Elkhart. This was the second annual performance. I highly recommend it as a great family friendly way to spend New Year's Eve.

It doesn't look like we'll be seeing a white Christmas this year. However, I do have some photos from the mini-blizzard in Goshen, Indiana a few days after Thanksgiving.

On Dec. 16, I went to see The Interrupters. It follows three violence interrupters who work on the south and west sides of Chicago with Ceasefire—an organization with a proven record of reducing shootings in neighborhoods around Chicago. The Englewood neighborhood saw a 34% reduction in shootings through Ceasefire's work.

My Grandpa Good had a phrase that he repeated regularly. “Show interest,” he’d say. I don’t know if I ever heard him explain what he meant, but I grew up surrounded by people trying to follow his advice. Grandpa passed away ten years ago this month, but if you sit down with my dad, or one of my cousins or uncles, you’ll find that they will keep winding the conversation back to you. “What are you interested in?  What do you enjoy?” they’ll ask with genuine interest.

This month Malcom Gladwell had an article in the New Yorker looking at the legacy of Steve Jobs. His central thesis is that Jobs' gift was not originality, but rather tweaking: the ability to take the inventions of others and refine and improve them dramatically. Gladwell points out that the iPod came out five years after the first digital music players and the iPhone more than a decade after the first smart phones hit the market.

Gladwell is building on the work of economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr who used this lens to look at the industrial revolution in Britain. For example, they point out the importance of the many engineers who improved on Samuel Crompton's original invention of the spinning mule. These "tweakers" dramatically improving its productivity through minor changes.

It's been a month since 150 of us gathered at Reba Place Church in Evanston, Ill. to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Christian Peacemaker Teams. For me, the months leading up to the event were a blur of organizing and planning. Thanks to the hard work of dozens of people, the event was a tremendous success. I thought I'd share some of the photo highlights with you.

It's been a month since I wrote a piece on Young Anabaptist Radicals about my experience of visiting Occupy Chicago. It was three days after they had started camping in front of the Federal Reserve of Chicago and 10 days after Occupy Wall Street (OWS) kicked off in New York. At the time, I wrote with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. The visit gave me a glimpse into the sense of possibility that I remember from watching the Seattle protests, but also a dose of skepticism bordering on cynicism. What could such a small group of people really do?