Yes, I'm a minister. No, I don't have a church.

I have been thinking a lot about children lately. (Not about having them. About the children who already exist.) Children coming across the U.S. border, fleeing violence. Children huddled inside shelters in Gaza, or playing on the beach, unprotected from the war raging around them. Children who become accustomed to running down to the bomb shelter when a siren goes off. Children who don’t have enough to eat during the summers when there is no school lunch program, or who go to school each day from a homeless shelter. Children who are unintended casualties of drone attacks in Pakistan. Children whose homes are more dangerous than their schools. We can blame it on their parents’ poor decisions, or their neighborhoods. We can blame it on their governments, whether those governments are Honduras or Guatemala, or involve Hamas. But too many people think of children as disposable. We would never call children disposable, not out loud. We love children, we say. People who block