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…