Just as they did during the Civil Rights era, Black authors James Cone and James Baldwin are generating condemnation and inspiration in a nation increasingly divided over perspectives on race and justice, two panelists said during Baptist News Global’s latest…
How slavery still shapes the world of white evangelical Christians
Without meaning to do so, Henry Louis Gates’ two-part series on “The Black Church” dramatically exposed the gaping chasm that divides the way Black Christians and privileged white Christians — especially white evangelicals — understand God, protest and politics. For…
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…
Why conservatives can’t get Jeremiah Wright out of their heads
The spectacle seemed to dominate every news station, barber shop, beauty shop and church fellowship hall across the nation. For months on end, an excerpt of a sermon offered in the sacred confines of the Black church had taken center…
In Georgia, demonizing Black Liberation Theology yet again
I am a Baptist theologian, and “professor of historical theology” is my specific job title. It is therefore of no little interest to me that a political controversy moving into the national spotlight involves a candidate who is a fellow…
Pastor, judge, activist, agitator: As he strives for justice, Wendell Griffen stretches the lexicon of adjectives
Wendell Griffen, 66, is all of these things. But his persona is so large, his reputation so loud, his “rightness” so locked in and eagerly defended, that the man’s depth can be lost in the shallows in which he must wade.
Racially diverse church occupies campus where Baptist pastor once proclaimed racist views
In one of life’s delicious little ironies, New Millennium Church now meets on the campus associated with one of Little Rock’s most ardent racists of the 1950s.
Photo Gallery: Wendell Griffen
View the photo gallery of Wendell Griffen.