ACNA’s New Vice-Chancellor for Safeguarding
In the midst of a difficult week for the Anglican Church in North America, there is a happy announcement: we have a Vice-Chancellor for Safeguarding, Jeannie Rose Barksdale! She has quite the resume, including a Stanford degree in Political Science and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
Now in case any reader thinks Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity is grievance studies, you need to repent of noticing. Noticing is Whiteness.
Since then she has been busy, including being an active member of Church of the Advent, Washington, D. C., in the Diocese of Christ Our Hope. But she has found time to write. So let’s meet Jeannie Rose Barksdale in her own words.
Back in February, she found time to write for that erudite and balanced Christian publication, Sojourners. In it she is sad about a repeat shoplifter getting caught at Target. The shoplifter needed more love. She is also “feeling powerless and overwhelmed.” Why?
Lately, it has been far easier to despair than to love concretely. The Trump administration’s strategy of flooding the zone has made me feel powerless and overwhelmed — which is, as Adam Russell Taylor recently described it, precisely the point. Even while wrestling with lament, I’ve wanted to move toward contributing to addressing injustice to counter the pervasive injustice that occupies so much of our news. But I’ve just not known how.
Yes, the first days of President Trump II were so awful, it was difficult to love, to even know how to love. Oh, the “wrestling with lament”!
There have been other times she’s been sad. The morning after was a dark day for her. Yes, the morning after Election Day 2024. She felt “the funereal mood of the city.” Poor Washington, D. C. The day began when she . . .
. . . woke up at 4 AM, heart beating wildly, as if from a bad dream—waking to a bad dream. I won’t pretend I felt anything other than anxiety and fear when I first saw the news. I prayed, read briefly, returned to prayer, slept fitfully. At 6 AM when I woke up the second time it was a done deal, anxiety and fear strong as ever.
Then during her prayer time, she confessed sins . . . other people’s sins . . . by those deplorable people who elected Trump:
I repent most acutely, for the decision we had taken the day before, as a nation. For becoming the kind of people who can make such a decision. For so many points in the history leading up to this night—a long spiral once you start to unwind it. I feel weird confessing this way. It is uncomfortable to repent for a decision I voted against. Perhaps there’s something important in choosing not to set myself apart as other than the collective, but my reaction in the moment is simpler: I just can’t not speak these words of confession over the events of the night. The first tears come.
Yes, the day after Trump was elected was a day of tears.
Days after the Inauguration of — I can hardly say the name anymore — on January 27th, she felt so much “despair.” She and her D. C. community had been “shaken” over federal workers actually having to go to work . . . at an office. Oh, the federal humanity. And they were shaken over Orange Man actually doing things:
The dizzying array of legal, policy and political changes hurled in quick succession, some of which seemed designed primarily to break things, inflict pain as an a victory lap. The abstract concern for vulnerable communities you can reasonably expect to suffer from some of these changes.
And she had “concrete rage against the injustice of undoing, in one fell swoop, the long, meticulous legal process that resulted in convictions against many of those who stormed our capitol.” How dare Trump free those Trumpist political prisoners!
She “shared with a friend how I was feeling, the powerlessness of holding that feeling without a silver-lining, lacking any discernible way to change things to make it stop.” Oh, to make it stop!
But she presses on even though Trump makes her so tired.
After some recent brutal development, I can’t even remember which one—the trauma of chaos makes it hard to keep track—my church small group gathered at our home, tired. Tired of the news, tired of things being so hard for so many, grieving yet another blow to vulnerable people, democratic institutions, the separation of powers.
As we sat to be with God together in quiet, as we do weekly, I felt a tug to invite us not to fixate on the obvious terrible things on our collective minds.
Yes, Trump makes even Bible studies sad and trying. But through it all, she and NPR are teaching her son well.
The term “extremists” came on as I was listening to NPR with my eight year old son the other day. He requested I pause, asked me what it meant. “What do you think,” I asked him, “based on the context? Did you hear they talked about it in connection with January 6? Do you know what that was?”
“Oh yeah, that was when some people attacked the Capitol,” he said, DC-child through and through.
What a DC-mom! What a Vice-Chancellor for Safeguarding in the Anglican Church in North America!
Like a child listening to the dulcet tones of NPR, you can feel that much safer, ACNA.