Our Connection and Our Responsibility by Karissa Horn ’26<\/p>\n
During Spring semester 2024, I worked in Furman\u2019s Office of Spiritual Life as a justice intern. I hoped to focus on studying poverty, and also to educate people about the role of the Christian church in alleviating suffering.<\/p>\n
I began the year by learning about the mistreatment of indigenous people. Part of the reason for this was that my fellow intern Kaycie was studying Christian ethics of land use, and we wanted to find a topic that overlapped both of our interests, so that we could discuss things together. We watched a documentary called \u201cBlood Memory,\u201d about indigenous children who were taken from their parents and placed into white foster homes. On my own I listened to two indigenous women speak about their spirituality.<\/p>\n
The second topic we touched on was food insecurity. During this time, I learned that a remarkable number of college students experience food insecurity, though they don\u2019t always recognize it as such. (As a side note, homelessness is also shockingly common among college students. Not all \u201chomeless\u201d students identify as such, but many have unstable housing, and some live out of cars or on friends\u2019 couches.) As a part of this study, Kaycie, Rev. Alexis and I visited Mill Village Farms, a small local community program. The \u201cfarm\u201d is a small plot of land in the middle of a low-income neighborhood in Greenville. Mill Village hires at-risk teens to work in the gardens, and hosts educational events for the community. They also hand out produce to those who live in the surrounding neighborhood. Gentrification, our guide told us, is a growing problem there: new housing has sprung up on one side of a nearby street, and the people who moved into these new houses wouldn\u2019t even answer the door, in contrast to the old neighbors who would stand out on the porch and hold friendly conversations. Familiar residents, some of whom had mental disabilities and most of whom were elderly, were getting evicted. And right in the very middle of the farm plot, between the store-house and the fenced-in garden beds, was a perfect image of this change: the bare shell of a tiny house under construction on a bed of red mud, slicing the farm plot in half. Whoever owned that small section of land had decided to build on it, directly in the middle of the non-profit community farm, even though the farm had been using those few square feet for years.<\/p>\n
The culminating project of our semester was a CLP on the topic of the death penalty in South Carolina. We didn\u2019t try to connect this concept to land use, but it is tied to poverty. We decided to host this CLP after a morning coffee meeting with Rev. Hillary Taylor, the executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (SCADP). Hillary shared some moving statistics with us, alongside stories of how she became an activist against the death penalty, and memories from her time in EVM at Furman. She was eager to give a CLP presentation, and Kaycie and I were both eager to hear more from her, so we decided to bring her in.
\nRev. Hillary brought another speaker along with her: a man named Rev. Jimmy MacPhee, formerly incarcerated on Death Row in South Carolina. Rev. Jimmy told the story of his conversion to Christianity within prison, and the way his life changed during his life in prison– going from seven consecutive years in super-max, to achieving parole after 45 years in prison. The change was his conversion. His story left us with the thought: if this man\u2019s life can change completely, even though he was not wrongfully convicted, how many other people could have been saved who were instead executed?<\/p>\n
Looking back over the semester, one of the most powerful things I have learned is that so many of the issues in our world are connected to each other. The suffering of indigenous people in America is ostensibly a political issue, but it also has to do with families, as children are stolen from their mothers and put into foster care; it has to do with religion, as indigenous people grapple with the loss of ancestral land, and the suffering of the earth that they have been removed from; it has to do with land use, as their home land is appropriated and smothered in pollutants. Food insecurity has to do with poverty, education, land use, gentrification, and family. And South Carolina\u2019s death penalty is disproportionately assigned to men of color from the lower classes.<\/p>\n
It is my personal belief that, as a Christian, I can\u2019t escape the responsibility that comes with being a part of a community. I have a responsibility to the poor, and all who suffer, because I am not truly well when someone who is a part of the same Body (the body of Christ, or the body of all God\u2019s children) is in pain. The Bible is bursting with insistence that those who love God love His people, and make a material effort to alleviate their suffering, without a second thought to personal expense. What I have learned, heard and seen this semester has taught me that all the issues that we notice in the world are tightly interwoven. Suffering breeds suffering in other places, but hope, compassion, and generosity can renew life.<\/p>\n
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Resources:<\/p>\n
Map of local food pantries, with contact info: https:\/\/livewellgreenville.org\/greenville-county-food-resources\/<\/a><\/p>\n Mill village farms: https:\/\/www.millvillagefarms.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n SCADP website: https:\/\/www.scadp.org\/about<\/a><\/p>\n Rev. Jimmy MacPhee\u2019s website: https:\/\/ontherockjimmy.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n Sarah Augustine (an indigenous woman) on decolonization: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Jxv0r3vxzcY&ab_channel=JustFaithMinistries<\/a><\/p>\n Kaitlin Curtice (an indigenous woman writer), on the podcast \u201cWe Can Do Hard Things\u201d: https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/no\/podcast\/187-5-ways-to-be-more-present-indigenous-wisdom-from\/id1564530722?i=1000603395823<\/a><\/p>\n Website for \u201cBlood Memory,\u201d with purchase options: https:\/\/www.bloodmemorydoc.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n Article on basic needs insecurity among college students: https:\/\/hope.temple.edu\/npsas<\/a><\/p>\n