It's impossible to separate our contemporary practice of the death penalty from our history around race and slavery, and specifically, lynching. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is where executions are happening today. And that's a haunting and eerie thing.

Whenever folks say radical Christianity is "a phase" of youth, I tell them they need to meet our 80-year-old nun or my friend Tony Campolo.

When one in three Black men are in prison, those larger systemic injustices become a part of what it means to love our neighbor as ourself. We care about dismantling institutional racism. That begins in relationships when you see injustice happen.

As Christians, we should be the best collaborators in the world. We should be quick to find unlikely allies and subversive friends, like Jesus did.

And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.

For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.

When it comes to the big issues like immigration, everyone has a role. The government has a role. The church has a role. Every Christian has a role.