When Judge Aaron Persky reduced Stanford rapist Brock Turner’s sentence from six years in state prison to six months in county jail, he did so on the basis that Turner was “a promising young man.” Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s stark thriller/fairytale…
Baylor, Baptists and slavery: A way forward
Last week Baylor University, the world’s largest historically Baptist university, released a study revealing the slaveholding and Confederacy elements of its history. The report, commissioned by the Baylor board of regents, considered the stories of Baylor’s founders and those memorialized…
Why vote to fund something you won’t ever use?
Last fall, my hometown of Austin, Texas, put a monumental public transportation bond question on the ballot: light rail, tunnels underneath downtown, electric buses. Austin’s Capitol Metro called the plan “bold.” Another way to say that: “Billions.” Austin voters have…
‘For fear of the Jews’: Confronting Christian anti-Semitism
As we enter into the season of Lent and draw near to Holy Week, we dig deep into narratives of the coming suffering and death of Jesus, and into what has been — across the centuries — a time when…
‘God bless white America’: Why we need to overturn white racial mythologies
On June 17, 2015, a young white stranger walked into a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. (sometimes known as “Mother Emanuel” because of its role as one of America’s most historic Black churches). That…
Ted Lasso is the antidote for everything that’s wrong with America
At year end, as always, I am reflecting on the books, movies, music and TV that shaped me. During the week that my wife, Jeanie, and I finished watching the acclaimed 2020 Apple TV series Ted Lasso, thousands of Americans…
Understanding Black theology, white fragility
Back in 2011, Raphael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (and currently in a runoff for one of Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats), preached a sermon drawn from the Gospel of Matthew about whether a person could serve…
Prescription for a divided nation: Love and forgiveness
It didn’t surprise me in recent weeks to read articles like the essay Gene Weingarten wrote for the Washington Post in which he lamented the fact that “I find myself profoundly disliking and disrespecting almost half of my countrymen and…
‘I am third’ opens our minds toward a Christian political ethic
The great Chicago Bears running back Gale Sayers died recently. I admired him for what he did with a football in his hands, but what lingers with me are two books about him I read when I was a kid….