Michelle Ami Reyes, PhD.

Peace Talks Podcast

EPISODE 01.01

MICHELLE AMI REYES

BIO

Michelle Ami Reyes, PhD, is the Vice President of the AACC and Co-Executive Director of Pax. She is the Scholar in Residence at Hope Community Church and author of Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead to Lasting Connections Across Cultures and Becoming All Things Study Guide and Conversation Cards. Michelle lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and two amazing kids.

Quotable

“We have to learn to say to tell ourselves, ‘I am not the standard,’ and to actually challenge ourselves to ask, ‘How much cultural discomfort am I willing to bear? How uncomfortable can I be for the sake of the gospel?'”

Transcript

Vanessa: Well, Michelle, we would love to start with the type of justice work that you are engaged in and specifically the parts of your own story that maybe brought you to this work in the first place.

Michelle: Sure. Yeah. You know, in my byline I call myself an activist — anyone that I know who believes in activism believes in the practical outworkings of justice on the streets of their community. Every person that I’ve talked to has experienced injustice in some deep and personal way that it just lit a fire under their bones. And the same is true for myself. From a very early age, I experienced racial bullying both verbally and physically. I just knew at age five, age six, that this was not the way the world should be…