Ever since its first appearance during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the slogan “no justice, no peace” has become a staple of civil protest. People of faith don’t always connect justice and peace, yet throughout Scripture, we see that God intensely loves the people whom society puts on the margins, and is consumed with correcting injustices against them. A former refugee from Myanmar, who spent years in a military prison and went on a hunger strike just to have his Bible, taught a valuable lesson about peace that convinced Jessica the slogan is true: if we want peace, we must begin with justice.

WORSHIP PARTICIPANTS

• Music team – West Houston Church of Christ, Houston, Texas; led by Nic Dunbar

• Scripture teller – Cliff Barbarick, ACU Department of Bible, Missions and Ministry

• Pray-ers – Joshua Marcum and Edwin Valdiviezo, Quito School of Biblical Studies, Quito, Ecuador

• Speaker – Jessica Goudeau, author of After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America

• Worship coordinator – David Kneip, ACU Department of Bible, Missions and Ministry

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

JESSICA GOUDEAU

Jessica Goudeau has written for such publications as The Atlantic, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Teen Vogue, is a former columnist for Catapult, and is the author of the recent book, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America. She produced A Line Birds Cannot See, a documentary about a young girl who crossed the border into the U.S. on her own, as well as Teen Vogue’s Ask a Syrian Girl web series. She has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Texas and served as a Mellon writing fellow and interim writing center director at Southwestern University. Jessica has spent more than a decade working with refugees in Austin, Texas, and she co-founded Hill Tribers, a nonprofit that provided supplemental income for Burmese refugee artisans for seven years.