Back in 2011, Raphael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (and currently in a runoff for one of Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats), preached a sermon drawn from the Gospel of Matthew about whether a person could serve…
Why conservatives can’t get Jeremiah Wright out of their heads
The spectacle seemed to dominate every news station, barber shop, beauty shop and church fellowship hall across the nation. For months on end, an excerpt of a sermon offered in the sacred confines of the Black church had taken center…
Reports of the death of white Christian America are greatly exaggerated
In the beginning of his 2016 book titled The End of White Christian America, Robert P. Jones issued an obituary for white Christian America. The time of death was listed as “in the latter part of the first decade of…
‘Freedom songs’ make a reprise during this year of protests
The wave of high-profile police killings of Black Americans during the summer got a lot of people protesting across the country — and it got them singing in the process. “The act of singing, in and of itself, is an…
Racial justice activists concerned that too many white Americans are tired of the conversation
Many Americans see little or no benefit in the heightened focus on racial injustice since the high-profile police killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans during the coronavirus pandemic, new polling reveals. Natasha Nedrick, however, is not one of…
Cain and Abel: A metaphor for the sin of casteism
In his 2016 landmark book, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, Jim Wallis reveals: “The most controversial sentence I ever wrote was not about abortion, gay marriage, the wars in Vietnam or Iraq, elections, or…
Why I’m quitting church: I’ve got better things to do than watch my pastor be run off over race
World Series. Halloween. Time Change. Full Moon. Election. COVID. And for me: Goodbye Church. I love my church here in Georgia and my ministers, my Sunday school class, and the friends I have made. But today, I resolved to put…
My Dad witnessed the last ‘legal’ hanging in America
My dad, Tom Moody, was there. Aug, 14, 1936. Owensboro, Ky. The last legal public hanging in America. “My brother and I got up before dawn and hitchhiked into town,” he said many years later. “There were lots of cars going that…
True confession: I’m addicted to being white
Hello, my name is Ben and I’m addicted to whiteness. I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, but I know I wasn’t born this way. No one is born addicted, but I was nursed and raised by addicts who were…
Will you join our church in declaring that this is a time to break silence?
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. ascended to the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City, one of the most historic churches in the country, and delivered a sermon titled, “A Time to Break Silence.” In this…
A grief unobserved: Why aren’t we talking about this at church?
When they flipped his body over, the bright canary yellow blanket fell on the grass. His hoodie was damp because he’d been laying there a while and it had been raining that night. He was wearing jeans and fresh Fusion…
I was trolled by the Right, and here’s what I learned
I knew Campus Reform was going to write about my Baptist News piece on white Christians and climate change. Campus Reform is a conservative news site that uses students as reporters to target progressive professors, and a young writer had…