Ahmaud Arbery and tragedy in Brunswick, Georgia.

Coastal Georgia’s Perfect Storm

Hurricane season is especially busy in coastal Georgia. As a native of Brunswick, Georgia, I remember evacuating the city on several occasions with my family growing up. Residents of Brunswick, a small town of moss-laden, tree-lined streets normally spend this season watching Doppler radars. But for the past several months, they have watched police and news reports.

Like the rest of America, they were quarantined. But they became increasingly unsettled at stories of a young black man reportedly getting chased down and shot in his own neighborhood while jogging down the street. Little did Brunswick residents know, they were tracking the perfect storm.

The Fatal Run

Jogging isn’t supposed to get you killed. On February 23rd, Ahmaud Arbery became a heartbreaking, fatal exception as he jogged through his own neighborhood. Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down on a street intended to be a safe space for him. As he ran through the neighborhood that morning, he likely never thought he’d be fighting for his life in broad daylight.

The First Narrative

As a lawyer with close ties to Brunswick, I wanted to help. My brother, who coached Arbery in high school, reached out to me about the shooting and inquired about next steps. Together, we helped coordinate local efforts to galvanize Brunswick’s citizens to help discover the truth surrounding the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery. And what we started to discover was troubling.

For starters, initial news reports highlighted Arbery’s past (unrelated) felony convictions, while subjectively reporting the facts covered in the incident report.

What if Martha Stewart, another felon, suffered the same fate? Would the story also discuss her record at ...

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Parenting children requires a rich understanding of God’s nature.

Mothers today face an onslaught of mixed messages about how best to parent in the 21st century. Podcasts, blogs, and books on mommy-ing abound, but many of them indulge regularly in shallow parenting advice and fallacies about excessive self-care or “me-time.”

In the midst of the coronavirus quarantine, moms on social media often advise diametrically opposed strategies: Take regular mental health breaks while your children gorge on Netflix, or schedule out every minute of children’s at-home education so they don’t fall behind in productivity. The message seems to be either “love yourself first” or “pour all your energy into your children’s future.”

Neither side answers the more important question: How do we mother like Jesus Christ during this particular cultural moment? In the words of an overused adage, “What would Jesus do?”

In Motherhood: A Confession, Natalie Carnes, associate professor of theology at Baylor University, attempts to answer this question by sharing her personal experience of raising three daughters. She follows the structure and style of Augustine’s autobiography, Confessions, and elevates the conversation about motherhood from the self-centered to the spiritual without ever losing touch with the beauty of the ordinary. Part memoir and part theological study, Motherhood: A Confession explores “how motherhood, infancy, and children disclose what it means to be human in relation to the divine.”

Carnes’s core argument is that mothering imitates God. We birth forth disciples, hand down tradition, and grow our children into the church. By knowing the maternal attributes of God, we better mother our own children, and we also ...

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The group’s latest album offers a timely message for this global moment.

Is a pandemic the best time or the worst time to release an album of children’s music based on the Psalms? Musicians Flo Paris Oakes, Sandra McCracken, and Katy Bowser Hutson hope that All Creatures, the fourth album from their musical collective Rain for Roots, reaches the world at just the right time and offers hope in the midst of a storm. The album explores the emotional range of Israel’s original songbook and points listeners to God’s glory made manifest in creation.

The three Nashville musicians talked with Megan Fowler about their project, which just released.

The three previous Rain for Roots albums have focused on Bible stories, parables, and Advent. What was the inspiration for All Creatures?

McCracken: We started out talking about Psalms, and then all these images of creation were so present in the themes that were coming up. So we started paying attention to that. A secondary theme that emerged was songs, loosely based on Psalms, but then creation and the creatures that we saw calling us into worship. It’s not strictly a praise album, but a praise album by way of the Psalms, by way of the owls and birds.

Hutson: When you say it that way, Sandra, the two themes that kind of run through are, one, there’s so much of seeing how God reveals who he is in the natural world; and two, yes, there’s so much beautiful praise, but there’s also lament and fear. I like that the Psalms are such a great way to display, to young ones in particular, that all of the range of emotions are okay to bring before the face of God.

Oakes: And that God is with us, not just in this spiritual realm, but in our humanity. God is with us in every bit of the physical world.

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I wish the world saw me as a Christian first, not as a threat.

I was on my morning run as the sun was rising in the blue California skies. There was hardly anybody out at that time. You learn real young not to run too early in the morning or too late at night.

I guess I forgot the lessons, the safety agenda my parents taught me. They knew what would happen. I brought my identification like my wife tells me to every time I leave. During the run, I wasn’t worried about anything, and I felt good. I couldn’t wait to check my pace on my fitness tracker.

Then it happened. I looked in the distance, and there was this white man on his porch taking photos of me. Every shot he took, I got more confused. I said, “It’s a good morning out here, isn’t it?” as if me being respectable was going to shield me in this situation or get him to finally see me as a human.

He didn’t answer. Here we go again.

My fear quickly turned to rage. I wanted to fight for my dignity in the face of being documented by a stranger and being told I didn’t belong here. Policed by a man standing on his front porch. Right there in Southern California, the ghost of Jim Crow’s “What are you doing here, n—r?” showed up.

But ultimately, I felt powerless. I couldn’t even call the cops because they might’ve mistaken me for the aggressor. This is what black men have to deal with, while others can enjoy their runs. Again and again, year after year. This rage forces me to be angry about our reality and have the faith to believe that better is possible.

But on that day last year, my rage that turned into deep sadness. On the walk home, I stopped, bowed my head, and cried. These were not tears of weakness. I cried because I felt what many of those who looked ...

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Privacy in the Workplace, 3rd Edition

This publication is your practical guide to Canadian privacy laws as they apply to the workplace, including easy-to-follow guidance on employers' privacy compliance responsibilities. This irreplaceable guide now goes even further to provide comprehensive coverage on important topics such as crossborder transfers of personal information and monitoring employees. It also provides tools and tips for creating an effective data management program across all areas of your organization, including developing appropriate privacy policies and training programs.

This book will guide you through private-sector privacy and data protection laws for human resources professionals, managers, and others who are responsible for managing personal information of employees, and/or who are responsible for ensuring that the organization's employees comply with applicable privacy laws when they are handling information of third parties on the organization's behalf.

Key Features:

• Managing personal information throughout the lifecycle of the employment relationship, from recruiting to the post-employment relationship
• A comprehensive overview of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)
• Key features of provincial privacy laws in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec
• A review of significant workplace privacy cases, including comprehensive coverage of Quebec case law
• Detailed guidance on outsourcing, including a full chapter on cross-border transfers of information
• A comprehensive discussion of employee surveillance, including video, computer, GPS and biometric tracking
• Detailed guidance on security best practices and responding to privacy breaches
• Essential information on dealing with employee social media usage
• A discussion of marketing and online privacy issues, including guidance on Canada's new anti-spam law (CASL)
• Easy to follow guidelines on establishing a comprehensive privacy compliance infrastructure
• An overview of the International Privacy Framework
• Sample Privacy Policies and Forms

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