I can’t remember how I met Aaron Morrison and his spouse, Katherine, but our paths kept intersecting in our small town. And the intersections were narrow misses, where we haunted the same spaces - the churches, the civic organizations, the work of making a better community.
And also, as a first round of the emergent homeschooling movement in the U.S., I’m always curious about others like me. I have soooooo many stories of people in the homeschooling movement that I could drill hard into that topic. And I may. But like Anne Helen Peterson, whom I love to follow, I’m following the cultural moments that spark my curiosity.
In this case, Aaron, who left evangelical Christianity for a liturgical grounding. His spiritual steps feel so familiar. I might have ended up there. Aaron attends the church where my sister-in-law’s father's ashes reside. He was a priest there in the 70s.
David and I entertained being Episcopalian before converting to Orthodoxy, and considering our discomforting presence in the Orthodox Church, we know there are people who wish we’d just leave them alone and become Episcopalian.
Yet here David and I sit, at the ecumenical intersection of progressive politics and traditional theology, which is not, in the modern sense, either conservative or liberal.
Show notes below:
Aaron spoke at a memorial for Renee Good, Alex Pretti and the dozens of others who’ve died in encounters with or detention by ICE.
Here are his comments; below are further resources.
Hello everyone,My name is Aaron Morrison. I’ve been a resident of Crawfordsville for most of my life.
I did not know Alex Pretti or Renee Good personally. But like all of you, I felt compelled to be here tonight. I wanted to stand with my neighbors to bear witness to something deeper than partisan politics, deeper than borders or allegiances to any nation-state: I wanted to bear witness to our shared human dignity. Because wherever the value of human life is threatened—near or far, citizen or non-citizen—that threat reaches all of us.
Alex. Renee. Geraldo. Juan. Natasha. Victor. Gordana. And so many others. They were ordinary people like you and me—people with dreams, with relationships, with joys and fears. Their lives were cut short either while in detention or through the direct actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—an agency funded by our tax dollars and directed by our governing authorities.
Like many of you, I find myself asking: What is to be done? What am I prepared to do on days such as these?
Each of us must come to our own answer. But I want to suggest that we begin here tonight, by wrestling with a question that is as old as human life itself. The theologian Kyle Lambelet frames it this way: “What role should the dead play in our politics?”
At first, that question can sound absurd. How can the dead have any active relationship with the living? We cannot see them or touch them. We cannot speak with them as we speak with one another. And yet, across cultures and across centuries, human beings have developed rich traditions of mourning and remembrance precisely because we have always intuited that death does not simply erase relationship. Somehow, when someone dies, it is not the end of our obligation to them.
Tonight, I want to invite you to consider that the dead can have an active and critical role in shaping the kind of community we choose to be. When we speak their names, when we tell their stories truthfully, the dead become a source of moral and spiritual power. They interrupt our complacency. They provoke our conscience. They call us—again and again—toward a more humane and just future.
But how do we hold that role for the dead in our shared political life?
Here, I want to suggest something that may sound even more uncomfortable than the idea that we can remain in relationship with the dead. I want to suggest prayer.
I know that for some of you, that word may raise alarms. I grew up in conservative evangelical circles myself, and I still wretch inside when I see “thoughts and prayers” commented on social media as a substitute for justice after acts of violence. Prayer can be used to anesthetize moral responsibility. But I also refuse to surrender a powerful tool to those who would oppress us. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said, “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive—unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, and falsehood.”
Whatever your religious background—or if you didn’t have a religious background—I want to suggest that prayer is something we all already practice, because prayer is fundamentally about attention. The poet W. H. Auden put it this way: “To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.” Whenever we concentrate so fully on another—on a person, a story, a truth—that our own ego loosens its grip, we are praying.
Prayer, then, is not wish-fulfillment. As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but to change the nature of the one who prays.” We pray for what we desire—not to manipulate outcomes—but to lay bare our will, so that we ourselves may be changed into people capable of justice, courage, and peace.
This is where prayer for the dead becomes especially powerful.
When we pray for the dead, we empty ourselves—our pride, our need for comfort, our desire to move on too quickly—and we draw strength from those who loved well, suffered unjustly, and refused to disappear quietly. We are reminded that death does not end responsibility, and that true, sovereign power is not proven by the ability to dominate or to take life.
Empires want us to believe that their power lies in erasure by violence and propaganda. But the dead have always been dangerous to empires—because they refuse to stay buried. They live on as a moral fire in our spirits.
That is why I think we have an opportunity tonight to act. I want to introduce you all to a special kind of prayer for the dead: The prayer of “presente!”
This practice comes from Latin American Christian movements for justice and was made widely visible in the annual vigil of the School of the Americas Watch. Each year since 1990, thousands gather at Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest U.S. military training linked to violence across Latin America. As the names of the murdered are read aloud, the crowd responds with a single word: Presente!— as if to say “here, with us, not erased.”
To say presente! is not to indulge in sentimentality. It is to make a claim: that those killed by injustice are still present as witnesses, as judges of our systems, and as companions in our struggle.
Presente! declares that the dead are not finished with us.
To say presente! is to refuse forgetting as a form of comfort. It is to acknowledge that the dead continue to place a claim on the living—asking what kind of world we are building, and who we are becoming.
In a moment, I will invite all of us to practice presente together.
I will chant the names of those whom have died in ICE custody or directly by ICE agents. For the sake of time, I will only read some of the recent names, but I want you to know that since January 2025 til now there have been 41 known people who have died.
After I chant each name, I invite you to respond by chanting the word “Presente” while you raise your candle, and I will punctuate the moment by hitting these sticks together. Let’s practice.
When we say this word, we are saying:
You are not forgotten.
Your life mattered.
Your death is not the final word.”
Sources:
“According to Christian doctrine, Jesus Christ is the redeemer of the world. The Greek technical term for teaching about Christ is ‘christology’, the Logos about Christ. I add the words ‘for us today’, which frequently occur in the ecumenical world, to the question ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ in the awareness that not all Christians agree on the ‘today’ or the ‘for us’. Many concentrate on the eternal Christ; indeed they use Christ to distance themselves from their own history... in saying ‘for us’, Christians in the ecumenical world want to go beyond those who would only accept a ‘for me’. To understand that, we must keep in mind the fundamentalist trends in Protestantism which make their central theme a ‘personal relationship to a personal Saviour and Redeemer’ and cultivate a spirituality in which the question what significance Jesus Christ has for me completely swallows up the other question: what he means for the whole created world, conceived of historically.
I do not think that individualism as a horizon is sufficient to express the significance of Jesus Christ. The individualist understanding says ‘Jesus Christ is my personal saviour, my redeemer, Jesus Christ, puts me in a personal relationship to himself, which then becomes the most important thing and defines my being as a Christian. My questions to this kind of piety relate to the way in which my personal tie to Christ is bound up with my economic, political, and sexual life.
I want to demonstrate that once again by using my national identity as an example. One of the factors governing my life is the history of my people. Belief in Christ concerns our whole life and does not draw us out of history into a private salvation history, but connects us more deeply and unavoidably with the others around us. Christ encounters me in the dimensions of my life. What has been done to other people in the name of Jesus Christ by my people also affects the way in which I am a Christian. It is clear that Auschwitz would not have been possible without Christianity. Christian anti-Judaism and modern antisemitism are part of my heritage. In this responsibility for what I have inherited and for what I am handing on I understand my life. The acceptance of Jesus binds me to others, and the ‘for me’ becomes ‘for us.”
One of the catastrophic consequences of capitalism is what it does to rich people at the heart of this economic system by reducing humanity to the individual. One can see how American commercialism presents all items as being ‘quite personal to you’, even if millions of them exist. Your initials must be on your T-shirt, on your ball-point pen, on your bag–and on your Jesus. He too is quite personal to you. The spirit of commerical culture is also alive in this religion: for fundamentalism, which is massively effective, Jesus is ‘my quite personal Saviour’, and really no more can be said than that. The confession of ‘Jesus Christ--my personal savior’ brings no hope to those whom our system condemns to die of famine. It is a pious statement which is quite indifferent to the poor and completely lacking in hope for all of us. In the light of this individualistic reduction we must put the question of christology ecumenically and ask about Jesus Christ ‘for us today’ in the age and place in which we live.” ~Dorothee Solle, “Thinking About God”
Leonardo Boff: “The resurrection of the crucified Jesus shows that it is not meaningless to die for other human beings and God. In Jesus’ resurrection, light is shed on the anonymous death of all those who have lost out in history while fighting for the cause of justice and ultimate human meaningfulness. As one author suggests, ‘the question of resurrection is rightly posed from the standpoint of insurrection.’ The resurrection tells us that the murderer shall not triumph over his victim.”
