african americans

"Teens have the ability to do theological reflection and to connect their faith to issues of justice."

Black people can eat at most lunch counters and travel across state lines without being consigned to the back of the bus. But the fundamental right to life continues to be haunted by white supremacy.

As African Americans faced first slavery and then Jim Crow, they nestled in the black church as a haven. In the 1950s and ’60s, blacks congregated to fight legal oppression. In The Color of Christ, American religion historians Edward Blum and Paul Harvey argue that blacks and whites were once unified under the mantle of Christianity in efforts to combat societal vice and ills. Yet in more recent decades, black religiosity has shifted.              

Though many within the black community continue to showcase their religious conservatism, others have slowly drifted away.

Brooks students entered a dated and pretentious room with the feel of an old study. They sat in a circle as they listened to Professor Edward Blum. One lecture illustration was the defaced image of Christ from after the Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The room transformed as Blum’s slide showed the stained-glass window with a hole where the holy face of Christ had been.

After I received the request to review Kelly Brown Douglas's book, I kept seeing her main thesis displayed in the news.

Princeton Theological Seminary can be a lonely place for an African American professor. During a difficult period, I saw Isabel Wilkerson on PBS.

Why did northern whites support a limited set of rights for blacks during Reconstruction, but then abandon them in the 1870s, and do little to stop the racial violence of the 1880s and beyond? Two new books shed important new light on such questions.

In all the commentary around Adrian Peterson and his son, one of the more interesting threads has been about the particular history of African American parenting and corporal punishment. Charles Barkley weighed in of course; so did Michael Eric Dyson. Jamelle Bouie pushes back against Dyson in this thoughtful post.

But the most provocative thing I’ve seen is by Brittney Cooper.

The Cubs and White Sox have some of the worst records in the league. Yet Chicago still went a little crazy over baseball this summer.

For scholars on race in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nothing in a recent official article on race and the priesthood was new. The forthright treatment of the subject, however, including repudiating myths that had been used to legitimate the ban on black men from the priesthood until 1978, was a matter of rejoicing for many longtime advocates of racial equality within Mormonism. The heroes of this story, however, are the black members of the LDS Church who refused to leave despite being afforded second-class status. 

The runaway slave narratives compiled by Devon Carbado and Donald Weise are as moving as any story by Suzanne Collins or J.R.R. Tolkien.

Here's the ad Newt Gingrich has been running in South Carolina since Monday night's debate.