By Miguel De La Torre We are called by God to be good stewards of the earth. Unfortunately, racism gets in the way. Environmental racism, defined as the link between the degradation of the environment and the racial composition of the areas…
Even Westboro loves its friends
By Corey Fields A young woman described her experience of moving to a new community and finding a new church home. She wrote of how the church made an inspiring first impression on her: “Everybody was super-accommodating, bending over backward to…
Homosexuality and the Bible
By Luke Smith In the recent decision of the Supreme Court in United States vs. Windsor, the court struck down the federal law defining marriage exclusively as a monogamous union of a man and woman. I have been asked by…
Thinking inside the boxes
By Bob Burroughs Every church has multiple boxes. There is the Worship Box. This box is very large, for it must accommodate a wide variety of people. The Worship Box often has “dividers” that are called such names as “Traditional,”…
Judgment and empathy
By Marv Knox Let’s face it: a white person doesn’t know what being black feels like, and a man can’t completely understand a woman. But during this long, hard summer, I’ve tried. First came the George Zimmerman trial. A Hispanic…
A queer baptism testimony
By Kirsten Brownsmith We know that God’s chosen people are the destitute, those who hunger and thirst for both sustenance and justice. But both privilege and oppression have a lot of layers, and it is rare to find a person…
What do Millennials want from denominations
By Ircel Harrison What do Christians, and particularly young-adult believers, want from a denomination in the 21st century? In the 20th century, the way to influence policy very often was from the top down. If a group with an agenda…
Doing the gospel
By Miguel De La Torre To engage in justice is to do it with, and from, the perspective of those whom society considers nobodies. While many within the Eurocentric context question the existence of God, those on the margins are…
Moral Monday thoughts on Isaac Backus
By Andrew Barnhill Hundreds of clergy and laity from throughout North Carolina have made their way to Raleigh this summer for a series of protests called Moral Mondays. Organized by the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, the crowd of…