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  • Let’s Make a Family Deal: Why I Wrote Love’s Promises

    By Martha Ertman

    Two Left Hands Forming a Heart Shape

    Photo credit: Leon Brocard

    This article appeared originally on Hamilton and Griffon on Rights

    I wrote this book for personal and professional reasons. Contracts have been very, very good to me.   Without them, I wouldn’t have my child, best friend, marriage, or job. Moreover, our son would only have two parents. Contracts, and mini-contracts I call “deals,” made it all possible.

    I’ve taught contracts and written about family agreements for nearly twenty years and want to bring those lessons to a wider audience. Call it stealth self-help, packaging legal information in a palatable package so that people in the families I call “Plan B” realize that they have more power to shape their families than they may realize and that contracts and deals provide powerful tools to do it. If policy makers, judges, attorneys, therapists and other professionals help families drink the contract Kool-aid, so much the better.

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  • Elegy for Rabbi Harold White, Interfaith Families Pioneer

    By Susan Katz Miller

    Rabbi Harold Saul White

    Photo credits: @stephaniewilliamsimages

    This article appeared originally in the Huffington Post.

    When I was in my twenties and thirties, I did not expect to ever want or need a rabbi in my life again. After years of defending my Jewish identity as the child of an interfaith family, I thought I was done with Jewish institutions and clergy. I joined a community created by and for interfaith families, filled with families that spurned religious dogma, labels, and litmus tests. And I was happy.

    And then, Rabbi Harold Saul White swept into my life, like some kind of mystical wind, simultaneously fresh and ancient, revealing a new way to connect back to Judaism. Here was a rabbi so radical, so confident, that he was willing to become the spiritual advisor of a community of interfaith families—and share leadership of this interfaith community with Reverend Julia Jarvis. He worked with ministers and priests, marrying generations of interfaith couples, and welcoming their babies, and helping their children come of age, and conducting their funerals.

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  • Mixed Media in Book Design

    By Gabi Anderson

    1-Initial process shot for the cover of Queer Virtue by Reverend Elizabeth M. Edman

    Art photos: Gabi Anderson

    Working in the creative department at a small non-profit book publisher, we are constantly brainstorming new ideas of how to get our books noticed while not breaking the bank. Perhaps surprisingly, our limitations are sometimes what help elevate our designs to a higher standard. Our department is constantly brainstorming new ways to communicate our message through a combination of digital and physical media. I have had to rely on my abilities to illustrate, draw text, sculpt, paint, photograph, and collage on covers. My favorite covers have always resulted from some sort of experimentation with media and imagery.

    For the Spring 2016 covers, we had a lot of fun with mixed media. Below are some of the few ways I experimented with mixed media with my designs.

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  • Teaching the ABCs of Faith Traditions in an Age of Intolerance

    Q&A with Linda K. Wertheimer

    Linda K. Wertheimer's book launch at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA

    Linda K. Wertheimer's book launch at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, August 18, 2015. Photo credit: Christian Coleman

    Linda K. Wertheimer had a fabulous book launch at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts last month. In her presentation, she talked with us about the classrooms she visited throughout the US to write Faith Ed. The ones in Wellesley, Massachusetts and Modesto, California stood out. Teachers in Wellesley spend half the school year teaching the world’s religions to sixth graders. High school students in Modesto take a world religions class in order to graduate. You can watch her full presentation here to hear more about her travels and the current state of fostering religious literacy in today’s youth. Here are some highlight questions from the Q&A session that followed.

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  • Siempre Luchando: Mothers and Their Children Under Fire in Detention Centers

    By Margaret Regan

    Karnes County Civil Detention Center

    Photo credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Department of Homeland Security)

    Dilley, a small Texas city eighty-three miles north of the Mexican border, greets visitors with a cheerful sign. 

    “Welcome to Dilley, Texas,” it reads. “A Slice of the Good Life.”

    That good life extends only so far. Just west of town, nearly two thousand women and children are locked up inside the massive South Texas Family Residential Center. With a capacity of 2400, the brand-new Dilley is now the largest immigration prison in the United States. There are so many children at the camp that they sometimes outnumber the adults, the New York Times reports; their average age is nine years old.

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  • A New Vision for Progress on Climate Change

    By Martha Easter-Wells

    Glacier melting

    Photo credit: Ameer boii

    When I read the news I am often troubled. Around the world, glaciers are melting at alarming rates, spelling disaster for the people who rely on those water sources for drinking and electricity. Sea levels are rising, forcing low-lying countries like Tuvalu in the South Pacific to formulate evacuation plans. And, in parts of Brazil and South Africa, water is rationed and crops die because of historic droughts. 

    As people around the world grapple with the effects of climate change, many stand to lose their homes—and their lives. Countries and communities in the Global South with the fewest resources have been and will be hit the hardest.

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  • Un-Renaming Denali

    By Christine Byl

    Denali Skyline

    Photo credits: Christine Byl

    I've lived in Interior Alaska for the past eleven years, about 100 miles, as the raven flies, from the highest mountain in North America. I have always called this formidable and beautiful summit "Denali," as do a majority of Alaska residents, including our three Republicans in Congress. Since President Obama just empowered Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell to change the official name from Mt. McKinley to Denali, soon you'll be calling it Denali, too. 

    For the past few days, I've been glued to the national media coverage centered on my home, and I'm thrilled that the rest of the world will finally call the mountain Denali. Unfortunately, in the rush to cover the big news, the media has been getting small but important details wrong, especially those related to the rights and identities of Alaska Native people. So instead of retelling the strange story of an obsequious explorer, a presidential hopeful, and the gold standard, I want to dig deeper, finding a route through the context surrounding Alaska's iconic peak.

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  • Tales of the Unexpected

    By Kevin Jennings

    One Teacher in Ten in the New MillenniumWhen I edited the first edition of One Teacher in Ten in 1994, I did so because I recalled how lonely it felt for me to come out as a teacher in 1988. I never wanted others to feel that way again.

    1994 was a very different time. Same-sex sexual relations were illegal in one-third of American states (a condition that would persist until, a decade later, the Supreme Court struck down so-called “sodomy laws” in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas case). Same-sex marriage was not legal in a single state: it would once again be a decade before a landmark court decision (Goodridge v. Massachusetts DPH) made Massachusetts the first state to grant marriage equality. President Clinton had just signed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law as an official policy of the federal government.

    LGBT teachers didn’t need President Clinton to tell them about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” as it had long been the (unwritten) policy of our nation’s schools: you could be LGBT as long as you never, ever talked about it. So the first edition of One Teacher in Ten was a radical act, as we were defying the de facto law of the land.

    The collection reflected the climate of fear and hostility LGBT teachers faced in 1994. Some contributors were out but many chose to use pseudonyms for fear of the repercussions of telling the truth on their careers.

    Nevertheless, the collection achieved its goal of breaking the silence around LGBT teachers and contributed to a climate that was different by the time I edited an all-new second edition of One Teacher in Ten in 2004. By then sodomy laws had been struck down and the march to marriage equality had begun in Massachusetts. Many more contributors were out than in 1994 and I left feeling very hopeful about the future.

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  • On the Bridge

    By Ronnie Greene

    Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Danziger Bridge shootings. Ronnie Greene’s Shots on the Bridge was released on the same day the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed an order granting the officers a new trial based on misconduct by prosecutors that judges said tainted the officers’ trial back in 2011. Ten years after the shots on the bridge, the four surviving victims are still waiting for legal resolution. This excerpt from Greene’s book takes us back to that fateful day in 2005 when the officers appeared on the bridge for an unrelated distress call. In Greene’s vivid prose, the scene reads like something out of a movie.

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  • Striking Down the Nostalgia for Mammy: Black Women and Labor Activism

    By Premilla Nadasen

    Mammy and Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind

    Nearly eighty years ago, Margaret Mitchell published what would become a best-selling novel, Gone with the Wind. More than thirty million copies have sold worldwide, and in 1939, the film adaptation was released. The novel tells the tale of a young white woman slaveholder, Scarlett O’Hara, who struggles to come to terms with her descent into poverty in the South during and after the Civil War. The story is hailed as a classic in American literature and beloved by audiences for its heroic portrayal of one headstrong woman’s journey for independence and self-discovery.

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