Opinion

Continually ruminating on our hurts and peeves creates a spiritual toxin which accumulates over time. The brain keeps sending and resending negative messages.

Decrying white nationalists is an ethical lay-up for which no white person should feel the slightest hint of self-congratulatory pride. To concretely repair racial injustices and facilitate socioeconomic advances for persons of color is the more difficult work to which we can commit ourselves.

What we read in these stories are perspectives of faith by people of faith who were every bit as fallible, flawed and finite in understanding as we are.

People of color did not create racism, yet we are often looked to for the solution to end it. It’s not my responsibility to end the power and privilege of white people. And even if you think it is our responsibility, we cannot end it because more times than not, our voices are muted as soon as people see the color of our skin.

North Americans are increasingly likely to attribute success not to luck, but to talent and hard work. Increasingly, we believe that we “make our own luck.” That’s a problem.

The courage and faith displayed by people of color as the literal flames of racism burned around them is a call to repentance for all white people for our complicity in systems that perpetuate these sins. But it also signals a hope for a church afflicted with and inflicting white supremacy.

With our mouths we will give you great thanks, God, for you stand at the right hand of the oppressed, and through your oppressed body comes our liberation.

The great divide in our country is not between the secular left and the religious right; it’s between white evangelicals who vote Republican and non-white evangelicals who don’t.

We have to understand that justice depends on people telling the truth. Lies are matches that destroy forests that have been growing for decades. Lies turn harmony into hatred. Lies makes us forget how good honesty is.

The Baptist orthodoxy wars taught me this: When ideologues decide you are a heretic, they’ll raise the doctrinal ante until they prove it — if not to you, at least to themselves.

For me, anxious dreams represent a call to change. But change is hard. Change is difficult because it involves hard work — a multistep process that must be surrounded by prayer and discernment.

Para mí, los sueños de ansiedad representan un llamado al cambio. Pero el cambio es difícil. El cambio es difícil porque implica un trabajo arduo: un proceso de varios pasos que debe de estar rodeado de oración y discernimiento.

God’s invitation is nothing less than a beckoning to receive what God alone can provide: grace. Grace receives us as we are and renews the human spirit. Grace reminds us of who we are created to be and supplies the enervating work of the Spirit that we might fully live.

Gone are the days when we can just follow the masses to church without ever actually following God’s Son, Jesus Christ. But isn’t that good?