The American Church is in crisis, largely because of multiple crises, few of which are momentary. We’re in it for the long haul.
‘It feels like being hunted’: American churches, mass shootings and ‘the slaughter of the innocents’
It’s a question we have asked countless times: have we reached a turning point? Do our faith communities, whose history began at the place of the skull and the killing fields of a Roman coliseum, have a will or a witness for our assault-weapon-proliferated, executionary times?
‘Send her back!’ A racist call-and-response compels white Christians to ask hard questions
This isn’t just about the law or the president. It’s about us, the “white us,” engaged in actions with frightening implications for, with or about white Christianity, compelling us to ask hard questions of our churches and each other.
WWJDD: What Would James Dunn Do? America on July 4, 2019
Had James Dunn lived to witness this year’s Fourth of July event – hijacked by President Trump – he would have let his freedom of dissent ring loud and clear. At this moment in the history of American Christianity and American government, Dunn’s distinctive gospel dissent needs to be heard and heeded.
The Color of Compromise: American Christianity’s legacy of racism calls for ‘repentance and repair’
In his new book, The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby documents the ways in which white Christians, churches and religious institutions inside and outside the South manifested, acquiesced to and facilitated racist responses to people of color in general and African Americans in particular.
‘Doesn’t anyone want to be baptized anymore?’ The ‘tangibilifying’ grace of baptism
Faith and baptism are intricately related. Faith keeps baptism from becoming simply a magic ritual for fulfilling a salvific requirement; while baptism keeps faith from becoming simply an individual experience. It unites us with God’s new community, the Church.
From her mouth to God’s ear? Women’s voices, homiletical testosterone and radical redemption
Across the years, women in my family, in my classes and in the church have taught me this: Christ’s gospel isn’t measured by biology or hierarchy, but by radical redemption. God hears any voice that preaches Jesus.
Apocalypse soon? Faith communities and preparing for the environmental end times
The creeping things got here first, Genesis tells us. Human beings came later. That was then; this is now: it appears that millennia later humanity is working diligently to reverse creation and be alone again.
Everybody’s: sometimes the gospel finds us in the ‘world’ before we find it in the Church
My long interest in American religion doubtless began in the 1950s and ’60s at Everybody’s, Fort Worth’s first real discount store. All kinds of people shopped at Everybody’s, but not everyone was treated equally.