“That’s not your seat” is a phrase used by Morgan DePerno, a student in my church history class, as the title for her recent review of Martin Luther King Jr’s Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. For Morgan, “that’s not…
McAfee preaching professor returning to pulpit
Brett Younger, associate professor of preaching at Mercer’s University McAfee School of Theology, has been named senior pastor of the historic Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, N.Y. Younger, 55, takes over June 1 as pastor of the Congregational church founded in…
Faith leaders ask candidates to give poor ‘living wage’
On the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dozens of faith leaders are calling for the U.S. presidential candidates to include a “living wage” for low-income workers in their political agendas.
How Martin Luther King Jr. predicted the decline of the church
So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average…
Why I will protest a school I love
I am a pastor who loves Jesus. Yet I’m also realizing I’m a pastor who loves comfort, ease, a good reputation, and money almost just as much. These idols cause me to fear writing the words you’re now reading.
Unarmed truth and unconditional love
The year 1964 was a difficult one for the United States. The nation had suffered the assassination of a beloved President in November of the year before. The war in Vietnam was heating up in 1964: the Gulf of Tonkin…
Religious voices respond to State of the Union
(RNS) In his last State of the Union address, President Obama made an impassioned case against religious bigotry and cast other key issues in moral terms. He rejected “any politics that targets people because of race or religion.” “This is…
Dr. King didn’t do everything
We miss the significance of the Civil Rights Movement if we attribute everything to Dr. King. In fact, if one studies the record carefully, it is amazing to note that most of the major Civil Rights Movement campaigns were actually…
Good power/bad power (The nonviolent Jesus versus the apocalyptic Christ)
It is vital to our spiritual health to understand the difference between dominant power and spiritual power. Dominant power is the power to externally influence behavior by the use of force, coercion, threat or promise, reward or punishment. Spiritual power,…
I thought by now racism would be a thing of the past
But I was wrong. On the night of April 4, 1968, there was a knock on my college dorm room door. It swung open and a leading vocal racist on our hall stood at the door with a smile on…
President Johnson’s scintillating Selma speech
Fifty years ago this month, the small city of Selma, Alabama, was much in the news. And now Selma is in the news again, partly because it is the 50 th anniversary of what happened in 1965 but also because…
Another shooting? Not again.
Not again. That was my first thought upon seeing countless posts on Twitter about a shooting in Chapel Hill. By now, many of you have heard about the shooting of Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Mohammad, 21, and…