ferguson missouri

Strongly held differences of opinion in our nation's life require both legal protection and public respect.

The BLM movement has issued a clarion call to the church, the black church in particular, to affirm a theology of resistance, not respectability. This means reckoning with who Jesus is.

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

At our church in Ferguson, people are no longer afraid to bring up the pain of last year. But anxiety over the deeper issues remains.

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 not afraid today," we sang as we walked. I turned to the person next to me and whispered, "That's a lie."

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.

In the last six weeks police officers have killed at least five unarmed African American men: Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, and Michael Brown. This does not include Kajieme Powell, who was carrying a steak knife when two officers gunned him down just a few miles away from the site of Brown’s death. As much as some commentators might want to dismiss the protests as the cynical work of “screamers” and “race hustlers,” there is no doubt that the unrest sprung in large part from a righteous indignation at this nation’s long and persistent record of state violence against black men.

Police overreach has long targeted black Americans. And in Ferguson, cops who don't seem to know what they're doing have massive firepower with which to do it.

It's difficult to imagine police responding to white protesters the way they've responded to black protesters in Ferguson, Missouri.