I’m learning it is hard to feel the impact of the violence. It is difficult to make it real, to bring it close enough to sense its cold shadow. It passes by the window, like the neighbor who briefly triggers…
Peter Makapela: One man’s journey from racial hatred during South Africa’s apartheid years to a voice of racial reconciliation
When he was 14, Peter Makapela and his cousin Xolani joined scores of other schoolchildren in Cape Town, South Africa, to protest miserable conditions in the area’s schools for Black children. It was 1989, the height of public resistance to…
Justice for George Floyd: what went wrong and how to make it right
From my vantage point as a lawyer, judge and Baptist minister, I have reviewed carefully the matter of George Floyd’s death while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers and the stream of events in the wake of his death. The list of what went wrong is long and damning.
25 years later, religious leaders reflect on how they might have helped prevent Branch Davidian tragedy
Twenty-five years ago today the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas burned to the ground with cult leader David Koresh and 75 of his followers inside. Religious leaders who watched the tragedy play out close up reflect on what, if anything, could have prevented it.
Consciences: distressed and dissenting
In Dissent in American Religion, the great historian Edwin Scott Gaustad wrote, “Should a society actually succeed … in suffocating all contrary opinion, then its own vital juices no longer flow and the shadow of death begins to fall across…
What would it take to improve police interactions with people with disabilities?
We must stop using our law enforcement system as a substitute for a failing disability service system. The rates of justice involvement among people with disabilities reflect in large part the failure to offer people services such as supportive housing, employment services and mobile crisis services.