Sojo: Opinion Follow Up

Dear Sojourners Editorial Team,

I submitted a response piece to Adam Joyce's recent essay roughly five days ago via your Opinions address. I understand your standard review timeline runs to six weeks, and I am not writing to rush that process. I am writing because the timeliness of this conversation is not incidental — it is the point.

Adam's piece engages Hegseth and the militarism question from a civilian prophetic posture I respect, and I said so to him directly. But the piece does something that I think Sojourners, of all publications, should be troubled by: it extracts the moral weight of military experience — specifically the tradition running through Jeremiah Wright, who wore the uniform before he picked up the prophetic mantle — without centering the voices of the community that has actually borne that cost. That is not prophetic solidarity. That is extraction.

I am a combat veteran, a theological ethicist, and a member of the community Sojourners has historically claimed to serve. I am also a contributor whose relationship with this publication spans nearly two decades and more than three dozen published pieces. My submitted response is not an attack on Adam's piece — it is the other half of a conversation his piece requires. Publishing one side of that conversation while that community's actual members await a response is precisely the pattern your mission statement exists to prevent.

I want to be direct: Sojourners has publicly committed to centering the margins, amplifying voices of those directly affected by the systems it critiques, and operating as a platform for social justice and human dignity. Military families are a federally protected class. Veterans of color — and the communities bearing the moral injury of wars prosecuted in their name — are not a footnote to that mission. They are the mission.

I am not asking for special treatment. I am asking that the standard you apply to my submission be the same one your mission statement advertises to the people who give you their trust, their money, and in some cases their unpaid labor.

I look forward to hearing from you.