“All religions, perhaps, began as crisis cults, the response of society to problems the contemporary culture failed to solve.”

-Weston LeBarre

When we started planning our first issue of The Flood, the barrage of natural disasters that marked the summer of 2017 had not yet begun. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia, and Maria (among others) which devastated the Caribbean and Gulf Coast, record flooding across Southeast Asia that left a third of Bangladesh underwater, and some of the largest forest fires in US history on the West Coast were not...

The voice of Malcolm X sounded from above, unmistakable in its anger. Thrown off balance, I looked up and saw two speakers atop a three-story building overlooking the chaos. The silhouette between them gazed down on me in my priestly stole and flashed me the peace sign as I walked by. I waved back as the voice became James Baldwin’s, and I wondered how many of the white supremacists on the streets recognized the sound of black resistance invisibly subverting their nationalism in real time. Their battle gear turned for...

Lord Jesus, teach me to be generous. When I hear this opening line to St. Ignatius’s prayer, said in unison with my community of students at Fordham University, I question what it means for us to be generous. Prayer and scripture require interpretation based on the times and the ever-changing situation. What does it mean, coming from a Church of the powerful, to ask for mercy? What does it mean for us to learn the gift of generosity? To give and not to count the cost. It seems to be...

By the time we made it through Chicago everyone else had fallen asleep. Seven of us, loosely connected through a number of Catholic Worker houses of hospitality on the East Coast, had set out from Manhattan earlier that day for the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. We traveled along the Rust Belt, driving through counties that, less than a week ago, had played a pivotal role in the presidential election. All day long our conversations had found their way back to this topic, to our shared sense of...