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Pulse A COLLABORATION OF ADVENTIST ACTIVISTS

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2026 ISSUE 28

I AM A “STUPID WHITE HIPPIE” THE GENUINE GOODNESS OF THAT SAMARITAN CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S TROJAN HORSE STONE OF HOPE FIVE QUESTIONS TO TAKE INTO THE VOTING BOOTH

Uniting Hearts, Inspiring Action

CONTENTS 3 THE PULSE

THE GENUINE GOODNESS OF THAT SAMARITAN

5 JUSTPOETRY

FIVE QUESTIONS TO TAKE INTO THE VOTING BOOTH

6 SPECIAL MUSIC

WHO WE ARE

11 REVIEW

NEWS

13 INSPIRE

I am a “stupid white hippie”

stone of hope

ice is moving more quietly, clergy resistance is not

this is not a drill

adventists speak up with Indigenous leaders on youth justice

SPECIAL MUSIC christopher nolan’s trojan horse

14 THE PULSE

the testimony of jesus, sabbath, and liberation

GRATITUDE

for your generous giving

Pulse / JustLove Collective / September/October 2026 / Issue 28

I AM A “STUPID WHITE HIPPIE” About a year ago, Stephen Miller, architect of the Trump administration, while visiting Union Station in Washington DC, was confronted by protesters who looked like me. He called us “stupid white hippies” and told us to “Go take a nap.” He meant it as an insult. In a sense, he was correct. I like naps. But I also participate in protests, and the demographics are predictable. A lot of us are boomers—hippies—and white. As for stupid, I’ll get to that. I wear Miller’s insult with pride. I am a stupid white hippie, and I will oppose fascism wherever I see it. Many of us are old enough to remember the civil rights movement. We watched our country quake as many in power defended systemic racism. We watched people march, get beaten, go to jail and sometimes die. Out of that struggle came the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, moving America closer to its promise of justice for all. Now we watch as those victories are systematically eviscerated by an activist Supreme Court. Historians recognize the warning signs: government puppeteered by plutocrats; institutional safeguards treated as obstacles;

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immigrants and minorities scapegoated and disappeared; political opponents named as enemies; troops deployed into American cities; white Christian nationalism dressed up as patriotism. Ill-conceived ruinous wars of choice. And the list goes on. Historians call it fascism. So we march.

American history makes clear that confronting power has never carried equal risks.

We’re also retired. We have something millions of younger Americans don’t have: time. We don’t have to ask the boss for the afternoon off. We aren’t juggling childcare, student loans and careers while trying to afford a house. Our freedom to protest is a privilege. So is my male whiteness. American history makes clear that confronting power has never carried equal risks. Blacks were lynched. Japanese Americans were interned. Native Americans were erased. Women’s autonomy was gagged. Those risks have not disappeared. I don’t pretend to speak for those who haven’t yet marched. But I know this: as an older, retired white man, I can march for freedom and justice with less fear than many .

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Americans. History unjustly handed me an immunity idol. I’m going to use it for justice. Not to protect myself, but to stand in the open when others may have more to lose. Miller looked at elderly white protesters and saw a small, irrelevant movement He was wrong. Millions have since taken to the streets. Those gray-haired protesters weren’t the movement. We were its visible tip. Which brings me to “stupid.” Maybe Miller is right. Maybe we're stupid to believe homemade signs can restrain a government corrupted by authoritarian power. Maybe we're naïve to believe white nationalism can be defeated. Maybe we’re fools to believe America can still become what it has always claimed to be: a nation with liberty and justice for all.

Perhaps. But I have another word for that stupidity. Hope. America exists because people hoped for things that looked impossible. Slavery ended because people hoped. Jim Crow fell because people hoped. Civil rights were won because people hoped —and marched. Fear tells us power cannot be challenged. Fear tells us to keep our heads down. Fear tells us to stay home. Hope gets us off the couch. Stephen Miller thinks calling us stupid white hippies will make us go away. It won’t. I’m a stupid white hippie. And I’m still marching. Because I’m still hoping.

—Dave Gemmell

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JustPoetry

Stone of Hope Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” –Inscription, MLK Memorial

No one looks me in the eyes these days. If I could I’d uncross these arms, breathe in cherry trees, breathe out a tidal basin. If I could, I’d step off this stone, trade this polished skin for scars, untie the granite tie, take off the millstone shoes – wade back into the living muck of now. You think you know me. Have you seen the sky thin around an early moon and known you’d be alone all night? Have you ached for touch? Have you stared at your reflection on a lake where no-one ever swims? I need to disappear into the dark country of my woman’s body. I need the night sweat from my child’s neck. Instead, I am illuminated by a thousand distant flashes. I am a granite answer to the prayers of young men, dying. I am done with being bound inside a stone of hope. I can’t breathe. —Craig van Rooyen is a judge and a national award-winning poet in San Luis Obispo, California.

Special Music

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ICE IS MOVING MORE QUIETLY, CLERGY RESISTANCE IS NOT

Bee Moorhead was surprised by the turnout at a July 7 press conference in San Antonio, calling for free and fair elections. The event was simple: a group of clergy, standing in front of San Fernando Cathedral on the city’s Main Plaza, announcing their intention to ask individual lawmakers to sign commitments to defend constitutional voting rights. Important work, she knew, but not usually the stuff of headlines. Moorhead has been organizing clergy around the state as executive director of Texas Impact for more than 20 years, and she said she’s accustomed to being all but ignored by the media and everyone else. “Faith leaders all over the country, and certainly in Texas, keep speaking up and what comes back is, ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’” she said. But suddenly, there were microphones and cameras. People were listening to what the group of interfaith pastors, imams, rabbis, and priests were saying about the need to protect voting rights. Something was changing. Moorhead had launched the policy initiative and called the press conference in coordination with national interfaith organizing group Faith In Us, which formed after clergy from multiple faiths in Minneapolis and St. Paul took a visible role in the resistance movement during Operation Metro Surge. In January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement was overwhelming the Twin Cities, clergy there began

to call for sustained national mobilization of their peers. Faith leaders invited colleagues from around the country to come and train with community organizers and unions in Minneapolis. “Ideally we want them to witness what is happening here and take those stories back to their communities, and also skills for if and when this comes to their communities,” organizer Peter Digitale Anderson told Sojourners in January. For Texas clergy, the “when” wasn’t a surge, but a growing, relentless pressure on the numerous immigrant communities and Latino communities broadly. It became like a pile of kindling waiting for a spark. When the press conference ended, Moorhead looked at her phone and saw a breaking news alert: Hours before the press conference, 200 miles away in Houston, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on his way to work. The spark had come. One of the pastors involved with Texas Impact called Moorhead almost immediately. “What are you going to do?” he asked her.

Prophets of policy Ordinarily, Moorhead said, she tries to steer Texas Impact away from individual incidents, tragedies, and sad stories. She’s wary of allocating attention only to those stories that are already being picked up by the media. She’s

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wary of stoking outrage without a tangible goal for change. In Texas, where conservative politicians control most levels of government and protests are met with little more than increasing police presence, Moorhead feels called to be shrewd. Salgado Araujo’s death was not a singular event, just like Minneapolis was not an isolated skirmish. While the 11 instances in which an onduty DHS agent or ICE officer has shot someone in 2026 attract media attention, the Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged 20 deaths in ICE custody in that same period. Churches and schools reported ICE monitoring parking lots and apartment buildings. People were afraid to leave their homes. Afraid to send kids to school. Afraid to go to church.

In Texas, no one knows better than Dan De Leon how difficult it can be to stand up for his understanding of Christian values over the din of rightwing Christian politics.

Notes hang from a fence in memorial of a driver fatally shot a day earlier by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Biddeford, Maine, U.S., July 14, 2026. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton. Moorhead felt it was time for clergy to become a fixed presence at the vanguard of the resistance. She aims to ensure the demands of clergy are directed at the politicians who can actually address them—asking state or city leaders to unilaterally end ICE operations would be futile because ICE is a federal agency. But she said the state government does have a role to play in how the actions are carried out within its borders and what happens to immigrants in ICE custody. So she started

working on concrete policy responses to ask for from state-level offices in Texas. On July 22, clergy announced their policy working on concrete policy responses to ask for from state-level offices in Texas. On July 22, clergy announced their policy agenda at the Texas Capitol, again to a surprising scrum of media. The state could once again assert its authority to regulate and inspect detention centers, which currently operate as black boxes to all but the increasingly unaccountable DHS. It wouldn’t be much, she acknowledged, but it would increase some level of pressure.

Claiming moral authority In Texas, no one knows better than Dan De Leon how difficult it can be to stand up for his understanding of Christian values over the din of right-wing Christian politics. De Leon is the pastor of a United Churches of Christ congregation in Bryan-College Station, perhaps one of the most conservative localities in Texas, and home to Texas A&M University, considered by some to be a bastion of conservative higher education. Though his church has been LGBTQ+affirming and actively advocating for various social justice issues for many decades, he said, people are always surprised to find them. They assume his church, Friends Congregational, is either Quaker or part of the nondenominational Churches of Christ, which is far larger in Texas. “It makes it hard to get legitimacy in an area steeped in tradition,” De Leon said. Speaking as one small voice might be novel, but it’s difficult to create the kind of mass movement that could match the power of the Southern Baptists and evangelical megachurches where Texas’ Republican politicians often visit not only the pews, but the pulpits. To act locally, he said, he often finds common ground with churches that are theologically more conservative but interested in ministries like food pantries and diaper drives. If he brings up the policies behind the need for grocery assistance, he said, the other churches shrink back.

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advocacy—in fact, he was the pastor who called Moorhead and began working to organize a second press conference.

Pastoral ministry in the resistance For many pastors, prophetic witness begins at home, helping their congregations see the lives of immigrants as connected to their own. Many congregations become involved in antiICE actions on behalf of people who do not speak their language, most of whom they will never even meet. But for others, the need for public action has come from the increasing anxiety and desperation in their congregations. In order to be good shepherds, they are finding that they must speak up for the sheep. For the past year, Ricardo Jimenez-Reyes has been driving all over South Texas, looking for ways to support the Latino churches in his synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Clergy accompany congregants to immigration court hearings and ICE check-ins. They deliver food to those too scared to leave their homes, help community members find attorneys, and host “Know Your Rights” trainings. He often helps pastors figure out how to make their congregations places of emotional safety for their neighbors whose mental health is wearing thin under the constant pressure. “The fear and the anxiety in this community is incredible,” he said. “It’s not just the detentions, it’s the uncertainty.” Then one day, Jimenez-Reyes got a call from a church staff member in San Antonio. That Sunday after the Spanish-language service, ICE had been waiting in the parking lot. They followed a man and his two children to their car and tailed them out of the parking lot, the staff member said. The family made it home without incident, but the entire congregation panicked. Jimenez-Reyes talked to the English- and Spanish-speaking staff, and the church ultimately decided to change their schedule. Instead of hosting the services back-to-back, they now conduct both simultaneously, so that the two congregations mix in the parking lot, making it harder to identify and isolate any one person ICE might be looking for. Still, he said,

many haven’t been back to church since. This fit something Jimenez-Reyes had been noticing—a shift in ICE tactics. On his last few trips to the immigration courts, the white buses were not lined up outside, nor were there armed immigration officers in the hallway, as there had been since May 2025. “It’s getting more sophisticated and secretive,” he said. The operations were quieter but more frequent. His observation is backed by data—in June, ICE reported 43,000 arrests, the highest total of any month in the Trump administration.

“I never would have thought that would be what we have to do here.”

The increasing violence of ICE actions is raising another pastoral question as well. In College Station, De Leon is feeling the need to pastor his own congregation, made up almost entirely of U.S. citizens, toward solidarity with migrants. Watching what happened in Minneapolis, he’s been feeling sober about what solidarity means. Providing meals, diapers, and material support feels obvious, he said, and has for a while. But as the situation worsens for immigrants, with more deaths in custody and increasing revelations about the conditions inside the detention centers, it’s becoming clearer that riding out the administration might not be possible. The time may come, as Minneapolis’s pastors predicted, when their city takes to the streets. It’s one thing for clergy to stand on the line, to put their bodies in harm’s way to protect the vulnerable, De Leon said, but he feels it would be a heavy weight to ask his congregation to put themselves in danger.

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‘Such a Time as This’ In November 2024, after Trump was elected, Field pulled two books from her shelf. One was by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous German pastor who was executed for his role in the Confessing Church’s resistance to the Nazis. The other was the daily devotional For Such a Time as This by Hanna Reichel, which explores the Christian calling during times of social upheaval, authoritarianism, and oppression. Field said she’s always been inspired by historical resistance movements. “I never would have thought that would be what we have to do here.”

As daunting as it is, Jimenez-Reyes said, the urgency of the times has clarified his calling. Pastoral ministry is his second career—he was a clinical psychologist before—and before last year, he had started to wonder if he’d made the right choice. He wondered if ministry was as relevant as his clinical work. Now, as he delivers meals, walks with people into courtrooms, and joins other clergy pressing for policy change, he said, “I don’t struggle with that anymore.” As the church finds more ways to stand with those oppressed by the state, Jimenez-Reyes said something that echoed in the stories of pastors across the country: “I feel more called than ever.”

—Bekah Stolhandske McNeel is a freelance journalist living in San Antonio. Excerpted and adapted from Sojourners: https://sojo.net/articles/news/ice-moving-morequietly-clergy-resistance-not

PURCHASE NOW ON

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ReView

THIS IS NOT A DRILL Still City by Oksana Maksymchuk University of Pittsburg Press, 2024

It’s back-to-school time for my kids, and my Inbox is full, y’all. Newsletters from the main teachers, specialists,extracurricular activity instructors, coaches, after-school program directors, club leaders, both schools’ parentteacher associations, both principals, and the district office. Sometimes it feels like a part-time job to keep up with all of the school-related emails. I often feel like a failure when my spouse calls me from his office and says, “Did you see that email from Calvin’s track coach? NO? Okay, I’ll forward it to you . . .” Minutes later, I find the email in question in one of my ten-ish email folders. All I can say is, kudos to Lincoln Public Schools for keeping us informed. There is a category of school-related email that always kicks my anxiety into overdrive: SUBJ: Standard Response Protocol Secure drill today SUBJ: Our EVACUATE drill today SUBJ: Shelter drill today SUBJ: Lockdown drill SUBJ: Relocation drill SUBJ: Secure drill today Most of the time, it’s a drill. Always a

scheduled drill. Once in a while, something actually happens at school; somebody needs medical help, so they use protocols to clear the hallways. I recall a fender-bender in my daughter’s school parking lot that required a stay-in-place protocol so kids outside wouldn’t bug the tow truck driver. The school kept us informed.

From Maksymchuk’s intimate perspective of war, war is like being in a relationship that lacks affection. I picked up a copy of Oksana Maksymchuk’s book of poetry, Still City, in which she illustrates the war in Ukraine and its impact on the lives of everyday people. The war in Ukraine may have faded into the background of our news cycles, but for the people living it, they still get all of the anxiety-inducing notes from schools. Obliterated schools. Wishing those emails from school were only about a drill, should the wifi be available to send an email. From Maksymchuk’s intimate perspective of

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war, war is like being in a relationship that lacks affection. Waiting for war updates feels like waiting for the abusive partner to text back, so that you can guess how your evening is going to go. The death tolls become mundane. “How many today?” becomes robotically rhetorical. Having little to celebrate, loved ones occasionally gather with snacks and wine to ponder the enemy’s progression and guess how much time they have left. What does one wish for on New Year’s Eve when your home is a war zone?

She writes about a mom who reports that the sounds of bombs and gunfire used to scare the baby, but now the child calms to it like a morbid lullaby.

The author speaks to the dark practicalities, too. Dressing loved ones in unique colors so that, when obliteration comes, perhaps their body will stand out during a recovery mission. She writes about a mom who reports that the sounds of bombs and gunfire used to scare the baby, but now the child calms to it like a morbid lullaby. Still City is 115 pages long—but I recommend you take your time with this one. Read a few pages, then pray. Read a few more pages, reflect on your own safety. Read another page or two and consider sending somebody an encouraging email. They might need it. This book broke me.

—Marcia Nordmeyer

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InSpire There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future. —Augustine

He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money. —Benjamin Franklin

A lot of people pray for We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

power, house, financial breakthrough, wealth. But few ask God for wisdom. —Patience Johnson

—Chief Seattle

Not forgiving someone is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. —Anne Lamott

Bethlehem was God with us, Calvary was God for us, and Pentecost is God in us.

The apples that are surest to go bad are those that never get out of the barrel. —Susan Doenim

—Robert Baer

I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. —Abraham Lincoln

--Compiled by Chris Blake

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THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS, SABBATH, AND LIBERATION Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza argues that the central theme of Revelation is divine and liberating power over demonic and deathdealing power. The one comes from the reign of the true ruler of the earth, the other from the idol of empire that usurps God’s power.1 The fourth commandment as it occurs in Exodus 20 points to the true ruler of the earth as the reason to observe Sabbath. In the Deuteronomy 5 version, it points to resistance of the enslaving, deathdealing power of Egypt as the reason to observe Sabbath. In both instances, it calls for resistance against the idol of empire. Jesus concludes His reading of the Isaiah oracle at the point where the prophet defines His spirit-filled proclamation as Sabbath: “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This is ultimate Sabbath in Israel. This strongly indicates that the early church defined Sabbath not as a literalistic 24-hour pause, but as the very spirit of resistance to systemic injustice. This is not a question of abandoning the seventh-day observance, but a matter of understanding its true significance in light of the Sabbath laws of ancient Israel. Jubilee is the year when Israel “shall proclaim liberty throughout the land” (Leviticus 25:10). And the Jubilee instructions end thus: “For to me the people of Israel are servants; they are my

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servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 25:55). Jubilee recapitulates all that Sabbath is about, including both the seventh day (see Exodus 20; Deuteronomy 5) and the seventh year (see Exodus 23:10–12; Deuteronomy 15:7– 11). In the year of Jubilee, the land rests after six years of planting and is left to lie fallow “so that the poor may eat” (Exodus 23:10, 11), the slave goes free with reparations after six years of free labor, all debts are forgiven, all foreclosed property is returned to the family, and those who have means must lend liberally to those who do not have means. According to the oracle of Isaiah (see Isaiah 58:1–13), God’s people violate Sabbath when they pursue their own interests, including when they cheat their workers and when they practice economic injustice. This is to say that “Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Sabbath is not a day to idolize self-identity, rather it is a call to a life of justice and resistance against greed and consumerism.2 This liberation lies at the heart of the testimony of Jesus. According to Isaiah and the other Hebrew prophets, this is what it means to keep the commandments of God: “New moon and Sabbath, and calling of convocation—I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and appointed festivals my soul hates. . . . [L]earn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed,

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defend the orphan, plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:11–17; compare Amos 5:21–24). The early church’s resistance to empire was the inevitable fruit of radical Sabbath observance. As such, it had great appeal to women, to slaves, and to people of the lower class and was “hated by the influential aristocratic leaders of society.”3

The mainstream “church”—as we insist on calling it today— has made its bed in Babylon.

The legacy of Christendom As it stands today, Christendom is not the resisting church of Revelation. Under pressure, the church’s resistance weakened as it gradually came to reflect the values of empire. When the author penned his vision, he believed that the end of it all would be in his generation (see Revelation 1:7).4 But by the time of the apostolic fathers, the church was fit to become the instrument of the very empire that set out to eliminate it. It became the empire. In essence, Rome hijacked the church and, by this method, it eclipsed the spirit of prophecy. The church became Christianity, the instrument of Roman imperialism and, later, of European expansionism. Revelation recapitulates the subversive language and acts of resistance by the early church against the Roman culture of domination and exploitation, and the Judaic religion that stoned the prophets and repressed the proclamation of the gospel in the interest of its own self-preservation. But today, a vast sector of Christendom distorts the message of Revelation in terms of the triumph of JudeoChristian nationalism, a ruse for a massive grab for power and money through ideological supremacy.5 How can a religion that institutionalizes slavery, enables the Holocaust, defends lynching and Jim Crowism, and seeks unity based on gender discrimination have the “spirit of prophecy”? The message of Revelation is that those who

join hands with these align themselves with Babylon and the beast. Revelation speaks not for those who can marshal huge tax cuts for the rich, and lobby for keeping out the destitute immigrants, for the right to own guns to protect their privilege, for the right to fire the LGBTQIA, or the right to Saturday exemption. Rather it speaks in the spirit of prophecy for the marginalized and oppressed people who seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before God. It is a cry for Jubilee—Sabbath in its essence. The mainstream “church”—as we insist on calling it today—has made its bed in Babylon. To read Revelation 19:10 and 14:12 in the context of the Roman imperial cult and the separation of the church from the synagogue at the end of the first century is to see a message to many in Christendom today. The church that reinforces its exclusivist policies and fights its ideological battles through the political system in a partisan way has made its bed in Babylon. A church that is consumer-driven in its missiology by prioritizing soul-winning over soul-growing, and defining unity in terms of denominational self-preservation is pursuing its own interest. It is yet to observe Sabbath as resistance to greed and systemic injustice.

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The spirit of liberation The testimony of Jesus invokes the spirit of liberation and imparts the liberation of the Spirit. It issues forth as the spirit of prophecy that boldly resists hegemonic systems of oppression. Until the church as it stands today is thus liberated, it remains an instrument of empire as it fights its ideological wars through political processes. Perhaps this historical moment in which the church finds itself requires that it attends to the early church’s understanding of the testimony of Jesus extracted from the oracle of Isaiah 61. It is the gospel of liberation that issues from the anointing of the Spirit. Sabbath as Jubilee is the foundation of this testimony. Jubilee is ultimate Sabbath— complete liberation from the spiritual decay that has marked human existence. In the Bible, Sabbath is the means of pre-empting systemic oppression and the inroads of imperial idolatry by which socio-economic systems advance the interest of the powerful in the name of God. Will the church continue to pursue its own ideological power-interest by joining hands with empire?

In his book Decolonizing Theology,6 Noel Leo Erskine models how one can take a theology of resistance and apply/indigenize it in a context that calls for liberation. As a student of James Cone, Erskine applied the critical analysis of Black theology to his homeland of Jamaica. There he recognized that the full power of empire had not only colonized the economic, political, and social resources of the island, but it also colonized the theological traditions of the people. His resurgent call for decolonizing theology is a call to faithfulness. It is a call to the spirit of prophecy. Adventist Christianity’s influence on the island of Jamaica must find ways to indigenize the Isaiah 61 oracle. We look for liberation that is Spirit-filled and Sabbathanchored.

—Olive Hemmings is chair of the Faculty of religion at Washington Adventist University. Excerpted and adapted from A House on Fire: How Adventist Faith Responds to Race and Racism: https://www.amazon.com/House-FireAdventist-Responds-Racism/dp/1922914045

Elisabeth Schüssler Fioenza, Revelation: Vision of the World, Proclamation Commentaries, editor Gerhard Krodel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), page 50. 2 See Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the CULTURE OF NOW (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017). 3 Earl E Cairns, Christianity Through the Centuries: A History of the Christian Church, 3rd edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), page 89. 4 The message of the early church was an end-time message. The outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost was the “latter rain.” 5 See Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020). 6 Noel Leo Erskine, Decolonizing Theology: A Caribbean Perspective (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1981).

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THE GENUINE GOODNESS OF THAT SAMARITAN If I was to describe you as a “good Samaritan,” it would likely be a way of thanking you for helping me out in some way. My car might have a flat tyre and you stop to help me on the side of the road, even though it was raining, or you answered my call to come pick me up, even if it meant that you were running late for the next thing you had to do. A “good Samaritan” has become a clichéd way of describing someone doing a good deed, across many Christian and post-Christian cultures—even if those citing it might not even know that they are referencing a story from the Bible. We borrow from this story to celebrate being a Good Samaritan to such a degree that we even have laws that protect those who step in to help others in “good Samaritan”-like ways.” As a society, we want to encourage people in doing good for each other and to protect people from potential legal risks when they genuinely step up to help. As such, this is probably the one story in the Bible that is known more than any other. Found only in the gospel according to Luke—of the four gospels or “Jesus stories” in the New Testament —this story of Jesus was written down by an early Greek convert to Christianity, so might have been attractive to him as an outsider to the Jewish faith from which Christianity had its beginning. It is also traditionally believed that Luke was a medical doctor, so the story of a stranger stopping to help a man who had been

beaten up and left “half dead beside the road” may have also caught his medical attention, as would the specific description of treating the man’s wounds. The story is relatively simple and re-told by Luke in just a few sentences (see Luke 10:30– 35). A Jewish man was travelling down the treacherous road that wound down the Wadi Qelt from the ridge-top city of Jerusalem to Jericho on the plain by the Jordan River. He was attacked by bandits, stripped of his clothes and badly beaten. The next two people to come down the road were a priest and a “Temple assistant” or Levite—but they both passed by, stepping to the other side of the road to avoid becoming involved.

This is probably the one story in the Bible that is known more than any other.

But the third passer-by did not pass by. He was a “despised Samaritan”—someone who because of cultural history and racial prejudice would not be expected to stop, particularly by the Jewish audience to whom Jesus was telling this story—but “when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him” (verse 33)1 and proceeded

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to tend to the man’s wounds before loading him onto his donkey and delivering him to the next inn along the road, making payment for his initial care and promising to cover any further costs. It is a valuable moral tale, urging that its hearers be alert to opportunities to do good deeds for others—even if at some personal risk and cost—and pushing back against racial and cultural division. It was told in response to a questions Jesus was asked: “Why is my neighbour?” to which Jesus’ answer was, effectively, “Don’t try to narrow who you might be responsible to care for, but go and be a neighbour.” Ultimately, a neighbour is anyone who might need our help with whatever compassion, time, resources or opportunity we might have. But there is a still-larger context for this story that was an important part of the teaching Jesus was offering in this story and the further insight into the expectations about what following God’s law mean for a life well lived. This story was not only about a practical demonstration of doing good. It began with a religious argument and a question posed to Jesus by “an expert in religious law” (verse 25). This religious lawyer asked the perpetual question of religious study: “What should I do to inherit eternal life?” (verse 25). What is the requirement for salvation, for goodness in this life and for whatever reward there might be beyond death? Jesus’s response was to ask the lawyer how he would summarise the teachings of the Jewish scriptures: “What does the law of Moses say?” The lawyer gave an answer that was exactly that given by Jesus to another question in the gospel according to Matthew, when He was asked what was the most important commandment in the law of Moses (see Matthew 22:36–40). Rather than picking a favourite—or top priority—among the Ten Commandments or the many other laws that can be found in the Jewish scriptures, both Jesus and the lawyer quoted two verses that seemed to summarise the whole of these laws. The first was to love God with everything we have—“all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind” (Luke 10:27a). The

second was the jumping off point for Jesus’ story: “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Luke 10:27b). But the relationship between the two is important. Jesus’ answer in Matthew added the important phrase that this “second is equally important” (Matthew 22:39). There is a risk both in religious thinking and in sequential logic that we would read this as “Love God” then “Love neighbour”—even after the assertion in Jesus’ answer that they were equally important. But Jesus’s “good Samaritan” story really pushes against our temptations to that kind of religious thinking, however holy it might seem.

It seemed they had “loving God” down professionally, but their failure to “love neighbour” demonstrated something missing in their faithfulness.

When we go back to Jesus’ story with this larger context, we notice that the first two passers-by were religious people: a priest and an assistant in the Temple. They devoted their lives to religious work, to pursuing the greatest command of loving and serving God, perhaps even encouraging and leading others in that work and worship. They might have even had

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good religious reasons for not wanting to get involved with this man half-dead on the roadside, given the purity laws that were part of their Temple responsibilities. Whatever their thinking, they were not the heroes of Jesus’ story. It seemed they had “loving God” down professionally, but their failure to “love neighbour” demonstrated something missing in their faithfulness. In contrast, the Samaritan was someone whose religious beliefs, practices and devotion would have been criticised and condemned by these other characters in the story and by most —if not all—of those who were listening to Jesus first tell it. The unlikely hero’s primary qualification was taking the time to notice and have compassion, upon which he acted. His was the example Jesus urged His listeners to emulate. As was common elsewhere in Jesus’ teaching, His harshest criticism was aimed at those who claimed to be religious but showed little concern for others. As one commentator on this Bible story has put it, “In the story of the good Samaritan, Christ illustrates the nature of true religion. He shows that it consists not in systems, creeds or rites, but in the performance of loving deeds, in bringing the greatest good to others, in genuine goodness.”2

As Jesus said to the religious lawyer, “Do this and you will live!” (Luke 10:28). While the original question was aimed at inheriting eternal life, it seems Jesus had also reframed this context to point the lawyer to what it means to do good and live well in this present life. Much of the remainder of the Christian writings of the New Testament make it clear that human beings do not and cannot earn eternal life or merit with God, but neither are we expected to. Instead, we are invited into living life with God, learning to love and trust Him and to be a neighbour to those around us. In the law of God, this is “genuine goodness” and the greatest way to live.

—Nathan Brown

1.Bible quotations are from the New Living Translation. 2.Ellen White, The Desire of Ages, page 497.

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FIVE QUESTIONS TO TAKE INTO THE VOTING BOOTH

Adapted from the JustLove Collective Voting Guide, coming soon.

Step into a voting booth and you’re asked to make an astonishing number of judgments about people you barely know. So we improvise. Republican. Democrat. I’ve heard that name. She looks competent. He sounds like me. I saw his ad. My friend likes her. That guy scares me. These shortcuts may help us choose a candidate. But they tell us surprisingly little about what happens when we give this person power. For a thought experiment, let’s look at the questions raised by the folks who spent their lives confronting powerful rulers: the Hebrew prophets. They lived 2500–3000 years ago under kings rather than democracies, but they knew a lot about power. And their stories ask the important questions.

1. What happens when this person gets power? King David saw a beautiful woman bathing and wanted her. There was one inconvenience: her husband. David used his power to arrange his death. Then Prophet Nathan marched into the palace, told David a pretend story about injustice. David was enraged at the perpetrator. Nathan looked the king in the eye and declared: “You are the man.” Nathan understood that character becomes

particularly consequential when multiplied by power.

2. Truth—or yes-men? War was imminent. King Ahab summoned 400 prophets for council. All but one told him what he wanted to hear. His name was Micaiah. Ahab loathed truth tellers. He raged “I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me.” Ahab threw Micaiah into prison and went to war. By sundown Ahab was dead, struck by an arrow.

3. How are things going for the people at the bottom? Amos took a tour of Israel and wasn’t impressed. The wealthy lived in privilege while the poor were exploited; merchants cheated customers and courts took their orders from the powerful. He wrote a poem that still echoes: “Let justice roll down like waters.” Amos measured national success from the bottom up.

4. Is anyone above the law? King Ahab had his eye on Naboth’s lush vineyard. Naboth said “it’s not for sale.” His wife, Queen Jezebel fabricated false charges. Naboth was stoned to death. Ahab got the vineyard.

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Then Elijah appeared: “Have you killed and also taken possession?” Is there one law for ordinary people and another for those in power?

5. Service or self? Nebuchadnezzar surveyed magnificent Babylon and congratulated himself: “I have built [this] by my mighty power and for my glorious majesty.” Daniel had warned him about arrogance and oppression. He didn’t listen. The Hebrew writers knew the danger of a ruler intoxicated with his own importance. Nathan. Micaiah. Amos. Elijah. Daniel. They leave us with better questions than Does he look presidential? or Is she on my team?

What happens when this person gets power? Truth or yes men? Who gets crushed? Is anyone above the law? Is leadership about service—or self? Maybe those are questions worth carrying into the voting booth. Because in a democracy, we don’t merely choose our leaders. We decide what kind of leadership gets rewarded with power.

—Dave Gemmell

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WHO WE ARE Pulse is the bi-monthly digital magazine of JustLove Collective. Designed by Jeffers Media.

PULSE CORRESPONDENTS

Unless indicated otherwise all Bible references are from the New Revised Standard Version.

NATHAN BROWN Is book editor at Signs Publishing, based near Melbourne, Australia. He is author of 22 books, including Practising Justice and Do Not Be Afraid.

CHRIS BLAKE Is the author of Imagine Life. All profits go toward JustLove Collective.

DAVE GEMMELL Is a retired pastor, writer, and lifelong student of the intersection of faith, democracy, and public life. He enjoys asking difficult questions, digging into the evidence, and making complicated issues understandable. He is blessed with three grandsons—and is in his happy place kitesurfing big waves in the ocean.

MARCIA NORDMEYER Is a circulation/reference associate at Union Adventist University's library in Lincoln, Nebraska. She is happily married to Jeremy. Their two children are encouraged to read banned books.

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ADVENTISTS SPEAK UP WITH INDIGENOUS LEADERS ON YOUTH JUSTICE Adventist church members were among a group of Christians speaking on Indigenous youth justice issues at Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra on August 17. Pastor Darren Garlett, director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ministries for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Australia, was invited to be one of the Indigenous leaders of the “Let Justice Flow” conference, hosted by Common Grace over the preceding weekend. “Having indigenous Christian leaders at the forefront of advocacy is something that we see in our community already, but my biggest takeaway is the importance of the allies behind them,” reflected Pastor Garlett. “We can talk about the issues and the solutions, but we want people from the non-Aboriginal community to stand with us and to work together, because the outcomes are going to benefit us all.” The Common Grace group of 150 Christians from around Australia had meetings with more than 50 Members of Parliament and Senators, calling for earlier intervention and national leadership in response to youth justice issues, particularly as they disproportionally affect Indigenous young people, who are 23 times more likely to be incarcerated than other young people in Australia. “I had such a positive experience at my first Common Grace conference where we heard from Indigenous leaders and experts on how communities and governments can support

young people to reduce the risks of them entering the youth justice system,” said Adrian Stiles, a member of Crosswalk Melbourne, an Adventist church plant in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. “The opportunity to speak with parliamentarians on this topic was initially quite overwhelming, but my experience turned out to be such a rewarding one.”

“This is a really practical way that non-Aboriginal church members can be involved—it doesn’t matter what side of politics you might support, because whatever side of politics can do better in this space —and to use your voice.”

Pastor Garlett said that he appreciated the opportunity to work with other Indigenous Christian leaders, to meet with Indigenous parliamentarians and even his own local representatives—and it is something that he plans to invite other Indigenous and nonIndigenous church members to participate in. “It’s been really good to have other Adventists among our group here, even if only small in number,” he said. “This is a really practical way that non-Aboriginal church members can be

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involved—it doesn’t matter what side of politics you might support, because whatever side of politics can do better in this space—and to use your voice. “So that’s a challenge from us as Indigenous people: just be engaged and this is one way that everyday people can do that.” According to Eliza Johnson, policy coordinator for Common Grace, they represent a network of tens of thousands of Christians and churches around Australia, “pursuing justice together for the flourishing of all people and all creation.

“These are heavy conversations, but I left Parliament feeling hopeful,” she reported. “There was a genuine openness to what we were asking, and a sense that many of our nation’s leaders are ready to consider a different way forward—one where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are loved, not locked up.”

—Nathan Brown/Common Grace

Captions: CG 2026-1: Adventist members at Parliament House in Canberra with Common Grace: (left to right) Averil Lockton, Harwood Lockton, Pastor Darren Garlett, Nathan Brown and Adrian Stiles. CG 2026-2: Pastor Darren Garlett, director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ministries for the Adventist Church in Australia, with other Indigenous Christian leaders at Common Grace’s “Let Justice Flow” conference in Canberra on August 17. CG 2026-4: Pastor Darren Garlett (right) as part of a Common Grace group meeting with Monique Ryan, Member for Kooyong (centre), at Parliament House on August 17.

Special Music

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CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S TROJAN HORSE

“The Odyssey” is the political movie of the decade. Elon Musk did not understand what this movie was. But this movie understands what Musk is. It understands who we are becoming and who we have become, and it points a way out. Tricks are central to “The Odyssey.” In myth, Odysseus is a trickster. He is described, in the first line of the story, as the man of many ways or of many wiles or of many turns. He is, depending on the translator, an ingenious man, a cunning man, a complicated man. He is a man of appetites and contradictions, a man who wants nothing more than to go home but keeps choosing to stay abroad, a man who yearns for his wife but cannot stop bedding goddesses. Odysseus is never one thing; he is always many things. Matt Damon is no trickster. I thought he was going to be the problem with Nolan’s “Odyssey.” Amid the right-wing outcry over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, it was Damon’s casting as Odysseus that I couldn’t reconcile with “The Odyssey.” Damon often seems to me like a man of a single way, a man who wakes up early and keeps to a clean diet and rarely has more than one glass of wine before bed. That’s not Odysseus. But Nolan wasn’t looking for a trickster. His Odysseus is something else. That, you can say, was Nolan’s first trick. I want to stop here and say a bit about

tricksters, because I have spent the past few years quietly obsessed with the archetype. The trickster is Loki in Norse mythology, Eshu in Yoruban stories, Coyote or Raven in Native American tales, Maui in Polynesia and Hermes and Odysseus among the ancient Greeks.

The Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the stranger, the weak and the poor. The function of the trickster, writes Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book “Trickster Makes This World,” is “to uncover and disrupt the very things that a culture depends on.” The trickster dances across customs and taboos, says what may not be said, does what should not be done. The trickster injects disorder into order, renders visible what is ordinarily hidden. The trickster causes the damage that makes growth possible. But a happy ending is never guaranteed. The trickster can be regenerative or ruinous. Coyote brings fire; Raven brings the sun; Loki brings Ragnarok. Hyde’s argument is that tricksters are both necessary and dangerous. They represent a tension every society must grapple with. A culture that cannot meet disruption with creativity cannot survive change. A culture that

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cannot protect its core values will be consumed by corruption. Too much order leads to paralysis; too much chaos invites collapse. We are living in an age of chaos. We have been living in an age of tricksters. Musk, President Trump, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes—the grammar of the modern right is tricksy. What is serious, and what is not? What is a provocation, and what is a promise? Why did they say that, and how did they get away with it? I am not saying these men are only tricksters. They are not the culture makers Hyde prefers to focus on. But I am saying that the dominant personalities of the age have gathered power by bulldozing customs and taboos, by saying what may not be said, by doing what should not be done. Hyde said that Americans love a trickster “because he embodies things that are actually true about America but cannot be openly declared.” That might have been true in 1998, when Hyde published his book. And I can see the argument that American institutions and mores ossified in the years since—that our society had become too rulebound and bureaucratized, that too much had become unsayable, that there was too little openness to transgression and invention. But today there is little that may no longer be said. The ideas and morals upon which the best of our culture was built have been disrupted and desecrated. The question now is whether that disruption can be met with creativity and renewal. This is the central question of Nolan’s “Odyssey.” This “Odyssey” ostensibly hinges on Zeus’ law: Treat the beggar and the stranger as you would want to be treated. But as a horde of classicists have pointed out, that is not the law of Zeus, which is narrower: It demands hospitality toward the guest or the stranger, recognizing that anyone could be a god in disguise. It is not an ethic of compassion or even reciprocity. And here we find Nolan’s central trick: Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into “The Odyssey.” Zeus’ law, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” echoes Leviticus 19:34: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your

native born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.” Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. But the problem with adherents of the modern right is not just that they don’t live up to it; the issue is that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native born is derided as suicidal empathy. The Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the stranger, the weak and the poor. It takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations. The modern right is built on the logic of tribute and dominance. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” But weren’t those iron laws replaced by the Golden Rule? When Odysseus concocts the trick of the Trojan Horse, taking advantage of Troy’s veneration of the same gods he worships to sack the city and make its streets run red with blood, is he a hero or a villain? Is it a trick or a crime? To Homer, he was a hero. To Nolan, he is a soul in need of redemption. Between Homer’s time and ours came a revolution in civilizational values, an upending of what civilization even means. Which side of that divide are we on?

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The modern right believes that Western civilization has lost the appetite for strength and dominance and hierarchy that built it. There is a reason a theorist like Bronze Age Pervert has become required reading for young Trumpists. There is a reason right-wing intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton have mused about the need for an American Caesar. There is a reason the Trump administration is obsessed with Roman-style architecture. It is not an accident that they keep circling this era, both intellectually and aesthetically. A recent exchange Musk had on X reveals how far this thinking has gone. A user told Musk it was time to “wise up” and abandon classical liberalism, because “universal suffrage leads to universal suffering.” His reply: “I have wised up.”

What Odysseus sees, eventually, is that his violations of the moral order have brought ruin to all around him.

Helen of Troy, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” is just an excuse for a war launched to dominate routes of trade. It’s a telling choice during an administration that is crashing into the global order in pursuit of more dominance over trade flows. In the cry of protest by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, against this regime, he also reached back to Greece to describe what he saw happening: “The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.” When Nolan’s Odysseus recalls the sacking of Troy, he blanches at the memory of 10 years of rage pouring into a city in a single night. It was hard for me not to think, then, of the pent-up rage that Hamas poured into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and that Israel has poured into Gaza a hundredfold in the years since. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, now describes

Israel’s future as “Athens and super-Sparta.” Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli-born historian who wrote “Sapiens,” sees the diminishment this foretells clearly. “A lot of the thinking, and also the practice, about what it means to have freedom of thought, what it means to be a powerless minority, was done by Jewish thinkers,” he told me. He added: For 2,000 years, Jews all over the world saw studying and learning as the highest spiritual activity. After 2,000 years, you ask them: What have you learned? You have studied for 2,000 years. What have you learned? And then people like Netanyahu tell you: Oh, we have learned that you need to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build legions, that you need to destroy cities. This is the only thing that matters in life. It’s a legitimate value system. Rome had its usefulness. But if after 2,000 years, the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did you waste 2,000 years, then? You could have just become Roman back then. This is Nolan’s finest trick: to make one of our oldest moral rules sound new again. To turn the best of Judeo-Christianity into the law of Zeus, so we can see why it might matter and what it might still have to say to us. What Odysseus sees, eventually, is that his violations of the moral order have brought ruin to all around him. Agamemnon, the king who launched the war against Troy, is dead, his throat slit by his wife, who never forgave him for sacrificing their daughter for fair winds. Troy is destroyed. Ithaca, Odysseus’ home, is overrun by suitors who seek his wife and land and think nothing of murdering his son in their pursuit. Odysseus and his men were not fighting the barbarians; they were the barbarians. And their actions led to more barbarity. So, too, has the political movement that rose promising to make Western civilization great again betrayed its inheritance. The world now looks at America and sees us as the barbarians: the country obliterating the global order, the country that takes what it wants and demands tribute from those who cannot resist. And what the political opposition has to

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do now is recognize what Nolan recognized: That it is an affirmation of our civilizational values to say that cruelty is a weakness. That only compassion and reciprocity build a durable and decent society. That order is necessary but order without ethics and restraint is perversion or authoritarianism. That there is both beauty and wisdom in the injunction to avoid inflicting on others what we would not see turned against us and in remembering that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, too. At the end of his book, Hyde considers when the trickster’s tale ends in ruin and when it ends in regeneration. His answer is that devastation comes when you cannot rejoin the worlds. Loki is bound beneath the earth, with poison dripped on him for eternity, and the end of the world is the result. Hermes becomes a connector between our world and the underworld, allowing Persephone, and spring, to return each year. In other words, it is only when severed worlds can be bonded that cultures can rediscover their strength. I do not want to make this too didactic, so I will just end here: Justice in America has come, repeatedly, when those seeking progress realize that the language of the Torah, of the New Testament and of the Declaration of Independence can be wielded on behalf of a new world. It has been some time since religion, liberalism and patriotism had a comfortable relationship in this country.

But the shape of the modern right has created space to do that work again. Regeneration is hard. It requires seeing old values in new ways. It requires recognizing that a moral inheritance that has collapsed into cliché holds power in an age when it has been debased and forgotten. But it can be done. It needs to be done.

Justice in America has come, repeatedly, when those seeking progress realize that the language of the Torah, of the New Testament and of the Declaration of Independence can be wielded on behalf of a new world.

Nolan’s Odysseus is not a trickster. He is a man living in the ruins brought about by tricksters. So, too, are we. This movie, and the reaction to it, is a sign that the age of the trickster is ending. Now we need those who would remake this world. —Ezra Klein is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” and columnist for the New York Times. Adapted from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/opinion /christopher-nolan-odyssey-elon-musk.html

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Faith calls us to choose love over exclusion.

sdakinship.org

UNITING HEARTS, INSPIRING ACTION

Season 1: “Justice + Love: Faith in Action” In a world crying out for both justice and love, The JustCoz Podcast explores what happens when these powerful forces combine with faith to create meaningful change. Rooted in the Adventist tradition and guided by the prophetic call of Micah 6:8, this podcast takes listeners on a journey through compelling stories of faith-based activism, biblical justice, and Christcentered community building. Each episode features honest conversations with movement leaders, grassroots activists, theologians, artists, and everyday change-makers who are living out their commitment to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” From the historical justice work of Adventist pioneers to contemporary movements addressing today’s most pressing challenges, we explore how faith communities can be powerful agents of transformation. You’ll hear stories of courage, creativity, and hope that will inspire your own journey toward meaningful action.

The JustCoz Podcast isn’t just about ideas— it’s about building a community of practice. Each episode concludes with practical steps and resources to help you connect with others and begin making a difference right where you are. Join us as we discover together how justice plus love can transform not only our communities but also our own hearts and lives. Because when justice and love meet, something truly divine happens.

Find The JustCoz wherever you listen to podcasts. justlovecollective.org

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INSPIRATION COLLECTIVE Other podcasts we just love

A House on Fire: This Adventist Peace Fellowship podcast series is based on the excellent book on race and racism

Red Letter Christian Podcast: Christian commentary on the way of Jesus in the world today

Adventist Voices: Weekly podcast and companion to Spectrum designed to foster community through conversation

Adventist Pilgrimage: A lively monthly podcast focusing on the academic side of Adventist history

The Social Jesus Podcast talks about the intersection of Jesus, faith, and social justice today

Just Liberty: A fresh, balanced take on religious liberty—where justice and liberty meet

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