A Knock at Midnight is the title of a sermon Martin Luther King Jr. preached in 1967 on Jesus’ parable of a man who knocks on his neighbor’s door at midnight asking for bread to serve guests in their home…
Joseph, did you know? A reflection on fatherhood during Advent
Three months ago, I became a father to a baby girl — my firstborn. Daily, I am amazed how something so small can draw out of me so much love. I am not underselling it to say that in such…
Juneteenth and the promise of freedom
June 19, 1865, is the day when the last enslaved persons in Galveston, Texas, received news that they had been emancipated. Juneteenth, as this day has been called, commemorates in the hearts and minds of Black folks the official end…
It’s time to break the chains of slaveholder religion
I first came across the phrase “slaveholder religion” when I read the book by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove titled Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion. The premise of the book is that America’s original sin of chattel slavery persists as…
Chadwick forever
My world stopped last Friday when news of the passing of Chadwick Boseman hit the internet. Chadwick, at the age of 43, was announced dead after a four-year battle with Stage III colon cancer. News that shocked his fans all…
We can’t talk about racial justice without addressing the ‘value gap’
What the eruption of protests – and subsequent riots – across the nation shows is that for too long black bodies have been harmed and victimized by the past and present values of white supremacy.
Can Kanye help spark a radical, new Christian Reformation?
The Church needs a reformation from “empty,” mainstream expressions of Christian faith profiting from indulgences of cheap grace, miscarriages of justice and deception paraded as sound devotion remixed over gospel beats.
I disrupted a speech by Jeff Sessions on religious liberty. My Baptist faith compelled me.
As Christians, our free exercise of religion, set forth in the Constitution, means working to ensure that those to whom Jesus came to minister – the poor, the sick, the hungry, the incarcerated, the immigrant – are not trampled underfoot in our common life and public policy.