“You rarely change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” —Buckminster Fuller Learning to tie your shoes in a new knot is really difficult. We spend years learning…
If you think the Jackson water crisis is just about Mississippi, you’re all dried up
Mississippi is “the Magnolia State” where Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was abducted, tortured and lynched in August 1955. Mississippi is where Medgar Evers was murdered June 12, 1963. Mississippi is where three civil rights activists — James Chaney, Andrew…
The re-assassination Of Martin Luther King Jr.
A year to the day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, publicly defined the war in Vietnam as a civil rights issue on April 4, 1967, in an address titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence to…
It’s a small world after all … and we need to survive together
The truth of the matter is that we human beings are stuck in this small world that we have to share in order to survive. How can we do it successfully?
There is nothing too good for the poor
A wealthy woman once gave Dorothy Day a diamond ring as a gift to help support the work of the Catholic Worker. According to some other workers, she slipped it into her pocket for a little while. A short time…
Do only black football players sexually assault coeds at Baylor?
This is a big month in race relations among Baptists. This week at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, Jerry Young, president of the National Baptist Convention USA Inc. was a speaker, and a participant with SBC president…
It’s hard to sleep
It is hard to sleep. Tonight, I struggle to reach the land of the sandman because I kept wondering if another scenario like the one at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina was taking place elsewhere in…
American folk religion
When I was in college, I had the privilege of spending a couple of weeks in Mexico, on a mission trip, as a member of something called a “youth choir”. A couple of pre-emptive answers to your inevitable questions: Yes, our shirts always matched….