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.
Will we white Christians continue to ignore the pleas of our black brothers and sisters?
We have a systemic problem, one that our African American brothers and sisters have tried to warn us about year after year, decade after decade, only to be ignored.
‘We can’t breathe’: an apt Pentecost prayer for white Christians
Now more than ever, we need that Breath in our bodies, that fire in our bones, that vision of an otherwise possibility that bespeaks sheer revolution and not a measured tinkering with a supposedly “broken system.”
Ahmaud, Breonna, Christian, George, and The Talk every black boy receives
Today I am trying my hardest to find solace in Jesus, another man who cried out to his mother, and to his father, when he was bleeding and suffocating on the lynching tree, being put to death by people who believed they had more power than he.
A lowdown, dirty shame: Ahmaud Arbery’s murder and the unrenounced racism of white Christians
I do not desire your tears, pity, lip service or guilt. What I, and I think many black Christians, are looking for from white Christians is renunciation. And only the genuine kind that includes a pledge to consistent advocacy and action for racial justice.
White politicians and conservative evangelicals are still riding ‘the wrong train’
Bonhoeffer was right. If you board the wrong train, running along the corridor in the opposite direction doesn’t solve your problem. White Christians need to get off the racism, capitalism and militarism train.
Confronting all who would abuse the sacred idea of liberation in a time of crisis
Liberation is a sacred idea. Those who exploit the crisis of a global pandemic for their own political purposes or personal gain are not liberators.
Our national curse: the cruel convergence of Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic
Trump’s cruel suspension of U.S. support to the World Health Organization is not only fraudulent; it is a crime against humanity.
‘Watch with me’: on the other side of our long night of grief, space to reimagine our world
The people who die from COVID-19 will come from every walk of life in every town in the country. But in aggregate, the pattern shows now and will continue to show that deaths by the disease are political deaths – ones set into motion by racism and oppression.
Amid this pandemic, we need prophets like Daniel to decipher the handwriting on our wall | #intimeslikethese
The coronavirus pandemic, like the handwriting on the wall in Daniel 5, has interrupted our nation’s imperialist and idolatrous banquet of materialism, racism, white religious nationalism and militarism that Martin Luther King Jr. prophetically identified as lethal threats to the country and the world.
We’ve got plenty to be afraid of these days. So why does the Bible tell us not to fear?
The point is not what we fear, but what a life ruled by fear can do to us.
Lent 2020: Improvising grace and embracing repentance, civility and dissent in ‘a time of national urgency’
Whatever else, Lent is the church’s reminder that we are ever improvising, seizing the half-baked idea or the unexpected moment of irony, tragedy or failure as an occasion for grace.