Where Hannah Writes

Originally published by Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center  on May 24, 2018. After pushing a resource cart around for over two years, this spring I was elated to welcome my students to my very own classroom. I no longer had to fill my backpack with papers to haul from class to class, wrangle a cart through crowded hallways or speed walk back to the office to fetch forgotten materials.  My classroom is brand new and is located at the very end of a long hallway, far from the rest of the world language department and almost everything else in the school. In fact, when the science department created a scaled model of our solar system within the building, Pluto was right outside my new classroom door.  I spent an afternoon eagerly arranging desks and hanging posters, maps, flags and student work on the walls. I filled my cabinet with supplies and made a welcome slide to project onto the screen at the beginning of class on the first day in o...

Every year, December rolls around and we start hearing Christmas songs on the radio, in stores, and in the hallways at school, and every year there are a few songs that stop me in my tracks and remind my soul that the creator of the cosmos shed his glory and honor, gave up his throne, and became an infant. Until this year, "Mary, did you know?" had been one of those songs. But after years and years of listening to dozens of versions of that song sung by dozens of artists in dozens of stores on dozens of radio stations, the question that the song repeatedly asks finally raised my eyebrows. Why do we sing a song asking if Mary knew things that scripture states that she knew? Why don't we believe that she knew what she claimed to know? As hard as I looked, I never found a verse in the Bible that said that Mary did not understand what was happening and felt confused and thought her baby boy was normal. Rather, Luke tells us that Mary marveled and treasured up moments and ...

**Posted on Facebook on June 14, 2018. Lest any silence on my behalf be misinterpreted as actually agreeing with the Attorney General's use of the Bible to defend a policy , let's dig a little bit deeper into this. Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a policy of criminally prosecuting people who illegally enter the United States. Part of this criminal treatment includes separating children from their parents when families enter the country illegally. Instead of being kept in detention together, children are housed at a separate facility. Over 700 children have been separated from their families since October 2017. Yesterday, the Attorney General used the Bible to defend this policy. He mentioned Paul and referred to his writings in Romans 13 that commanded the Romans to obey the goverernment because it was God ordained. According to Sessions, it is "very biblical to enforce the law." If Romans 13 represents everything that the Bible has to s...