Lucy S.R. Austen | Christ & Cascadia

Author: Lucy S.R. Austen

Our Common Tongue: On Elisabeth Elliot and a Lingua Cascadia

Posted by Lucy S.R. Austen | Dec 15, 2015 |

On a hot August day in Illinois, I sit at a long table in the cool, quiet archives of the Billy Graham Center. Playing on my headphones is Elisabeth Elliot’s 1982 speech to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. Elliot, who died in June, was a polished speaker and skilled mimic with a sharp sense of comic timing. In her low, cultured alto, she tells stories about her time as a missionary in Ecuador and the things she learned there about Christianity and cross-cultural communication. Although the events she describes happened more than 4,000 miles away, her observations seem particularly...

Northwest Abolitionists: A Window into Cascadia’s Underground Sex Trafficking Railroad

Posted by Lucy S.R. Austen | Oct 9, 2013 |

Every year, over 100,000 American children are trafficked for sex: stalked by pimps in their schools and neighborhoods, brutally exploited in a $9.8 billion a year industry. Children. Their average age is 13. They are lured away with promises, and coerced with threats. They are starved, drugged, imprisoned, beaten, tortured, gang raped. They are sold—filmed and photographed; rented by the hour for sex; sometimes killed. And it’s happening in the Pacific Northwest. *** Meet Brianna. She grew up in a loving two-parent home in La Center, Washington, a little town surrounded by rolling fields, with a view of the...