I’m not a “media hog.” I really don’t go looking for ways to get noticed, quoted, published, but it’s not been uncommon recently for a local television station reporter to show up seeking a voice from “our perspective.” It didn’t…
Civil rights panel blasts new state religious liberty laws
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has denounced new state “religious liberty” laws backed by Southern Baptist state conventions as a trend to use religion as an excuse to deny people their human rights. The independent, bipartisan agency charged with advising…
Alliance of Baptists moves ahead with plans to meet in N.C. to ‘model’ justice
Though some businesses are reducing or ending activity in North Carolina to protest the state’s new controversial LBGT law, the Alliance of Baptists says it will move forward with plans to hold its gathering next year in Raleigh in order to register its…
Lessons in discrimination: You’ve got to be carefully taught
My first lesson in prejudice and discrimination occurred at the impressionable age of 5. I grew up in North Carolina as the daughter of tobacco farmers and devoted church-going parents in a community consisting of other family farmers, tenant farmers…
The religion of the New Lost Cause
At Maundy Thursday worship in Wake Forest University’s Davis Chapel, the day after Gov. Pat McCrory signed NC House Bill 2, a transgender divinity school student washed the feet of an African Pentecostal student as the Gospel text from John…
North Carolina: Seeming rather than being
I like calling North Carolina home. It has always been home for me, and I have all of my North Carolina native bona fides to prove it. State bird: cardinal. State shell: Scotch bonnet. State tree: longleaf pine. State mammal:…
In North Carolina and Syria, the politics of ‘home’ is real
I haven’t lived in the place where I was born and raised in a long time. But sometimes a quality of “home” embedded in my consciousness is suddenly awakened — a visceral sense of rootedness in a place, among a…