Neighborhoods real and imagined
Ideas about the ghetto matter. They always have.
racial justice
It was the congregation's pro-LGBTQ stance that brought Robbyn Davis-Ellison's family to United Church. The commitment to racial justice kept them there.
Alternative realities
John of Patmos presents readers of Revelation with fantastical visions of what life could be, just as Dickens does to Scrooge.
Someone else's liberation
Reading Exodus together with Isabel Wilkerson reminds me that the biblical story is not told from my point of view.
In the civil rights movement, language of political participation was central. BLM activists are making a more profound demand.
Lent is early this year, so it coincides with Black History Month for a full 18 days. This overlap of sacred and secular calendars proves doubly sacred for Christians in the U.S. The sacred journey of Lent leads us to the cross—at the end of Jesus’ life of healing ministry and preaching good news to the poor. The sacred journey of Black History Month leads us to the lynching tree—as well as to African American innovators such as the man who developed modern blood storage and transfusion.
Scandal and New Girl are not ordinarily “about” race. But as national conversations on police violence intensify, they’ve stepped into the discussion.
Last week, when protests, violence, and a celebration of hope for justice took place in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, I found myself back in my hometown, as well as in my grandfather’s. Each was the site of riots connected to race and law enforcement.
Langston Hughes challenged our consciousness by asking, “What happens to a dream deferred?” What results when hope, aspirations, callings, and promises are delayed, put off, postponed, or thwarted? Were they flawed expectations? Do such deferred dreams become burdensome desires that fade and never manifest, forever haunting us? Six months after Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri—where I serve as a pastor—there are families still wrestling with the question, “What would have happened if...?”
We are confronting a reality that for some of us was just an abstraction: black and white communities perceive the police differently and are treated differently by them.