diversity
Is there an antidote to White grievance?
It’s hard to imagine this fear-driven resentment responding to outside counsel.
Will all American cities soon look like Houston?
Its residents are the most diverse in the US. For decades, sociologist Stephen Klineberg has tracked their views.
In the beginning, God created difference
Theodore Hiebert’s deft reading elicits a fresh awareness of the legitimacy of the other in Genesis.
In Genesis 1, we’re all royalty
The creation story and the divine right of everybody.
Our practices keep our commitments alive
To resist the kind of society we don't want, we have to cultivate the kind we do.
When free speech in the classroom hurts
School can't simply admit students from diverse backgrounds and expect them to know how to talk to each other.
The Witness of Preaching after three decades
To teach preaching, I need the witness of Tom Long—and others, too.
The Babel story is about the dangers of uniformity
Forget the tower. The problem is that everyone "had the same words."
Structural sin and resistant knowledge
“White privilege is your history being taught as a core class and mine being taught as an elective,” wrote a tumblr user in February of 2014. This claim illustrates how education sins in its ignorance.
Latin American liberation theologians taught that sin consists not only of personal misdeeds—it is also embedded in social structures that promote harm and inequity.
Renouncing 'the Magic Negro' urge
This temptation will always remain when we are willing to blindly benefit from and represent a system that is working well for us, without the concrete concern for others that are silenced or stigmatized by that very same system. In the name of making a difference, we can actually begin to help the system be sophisticated in its ability to point to its “change makers” (even though they are merely exceptions to the rule) as evidence of its commitment to anti-oppression.
Ten challenges for innovative church leaders
Every year, Unco is a good gauge to find out what’s exciting and difficult about being an innovative church leader. Here are ten things that I gleaned from our recent gathering.
Demographic turmoil
The nation's changing racial and ethnic profile will bring political change. But we can also expect it to elicit fear and resistance.
Camp meeting: At the Wild Goose Festival
Wild Goose was a weekend of
fun and free spirits, as amateur musicians circled up to play, local beer
flowed, Frisbees soared and people lingered around
campfires. It was also punctuated by moments of intense reflection.
Multiethnic mix
The key to building a congregation of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds is to appeal to them in ways that trump their differences.