Someone I know was killed by the police. When a friend from college texted asking if I saw that a former football player at our alma mater had been killed, my stomach dropped. Could it be someone I knew? I…
In this election season, I am partisan to the gospel first and last
It’s always about power, don’t you know? If that hasn’t become obvious to you in the past week, then you suffer from hardening of the categories caused by hyper-partisanship. I was on three calls just Wednesday asking me about how…
Lessons from a late summer pilgrimage
Walk the Walk was a walking pilgrimage of racial reckoning, resolve and love organized and supported by Red Letter Christians, Faith and Action, Vote Common Good, Greater Things, and the Truth and Conciliation Commission. Covering the 120 miles between Charlottesville,…
Let’s stop covering up the enablers of racism in America
Back during the heated battle for control of the Southern Baptist Convention, Ed Young once chided the denominational press for seeking information about a fundamentalist leader who had done something untoward. I can’t remember who had committed the sin or…
Who is that man in a clerical stole at the protest?
Jonathan Redding is a Baptist minister from North Carolina who teaches apocalyptic literature at a Methodist university in Lincoln, Neb. But arguably the most unusual aspect of his ministry is a calling to serve as a chaplain at Black Lives…
Opposition to couple’s BLM sign inspires neighborhood unity
Someone in Lincoln, Neb., picked the wrong Black Lives Matter yard sign to protest in an anonymous note demanding its removal. For not only did Erin Palmer and Jonathan Redding keep the “offensive” sign in their yard, they added a…
Q&A with Doris Garcia Rivera: Seeking peace in turbulent times
Doris García Rivera saw just about everything during 23 years as an American Baptist missionary serving in Latin America. And it’s a good thing, because she arrived at the helm of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America just in time to guide it through the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive social unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd.
In Louisville, learning as a white witness in Black space
Last Saturday, June 27, a paramilitary outfit of white nationalists threatened on social media to “take back” our city from the racial justice protesters occupying Injustice Park in downtown Louisville. They predicted that the encampment of largely peaceful protesters would be cleared by nightfall.
Defund the police? How about ‘defunding America’ through radical, thorough-going, far-reaching change?
The American experiment has failed because it has been inequitable, unfair, unjust and discriminatory from the start, sanctioned by segments of a religion which propagated it while benefitting enormously from it.