Across the decades, residents of “tornado alley” — the expansive swath of central North America visited by twisters every year — have heard myriad stories of inexplicable storm damage. A single piece of straw driven through a tree trunk is…
Why I’m a pro-choice Christian and believe you should be too
The Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a leaked first draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito. As an early draft, this opinion is not an official decision from the court, and abortion remains…
Remembering the struggle to integrate even ‘progressive’ Baptist churches in the 1960s
Writing from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his profound disappointment with “white moderates” who “constantly advise the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” We easily assume that, had we belonged to a…
Old tricks: For America’s Black citizens, there is nothing new under the sun
Throughout American history, when Black people have been able to advance toward equal opportunity, the mainstream power structure has tended to change its own rules in an effort to reinforce its control. In the decade immediately following the abolition of…
This progressive church reviewed its history and discovered it hadn’t ‘shown up’ very often on racial issues
Anyone entering the sanctuary of Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., for the first time will inevitably leave talking one thing above all — the beauty of the stained-glass windows on all sides of the English Gothic-style worship space. Look…
The scandal of the persistent ‘color line’ in American Christianity
In addition to Halloween yesterday, many in the Protestant Christian world celebrated Reformation Day, commemorating when Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, Oct. 31, 1517. This is commonly understood as…
The church and a future worth fighting for
Martin Luther King Jr. famously remarked that 11 a.m. on Sunday was the “most segregated hour in America,” This has been an enduring truth, and the reasons for it are both noble and ignoble. Sunday morning became the most segregated…
Racism and the evolution of Protestant support for private education
Earlier this summer, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision that private religious schools should have the same access to public funds as private “nonsectarian” schools. Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion cited the Constitution’s protection of the…
Everybody’s: sometimes the gospel finds us in the ‘world’ before we find it in the Church
My long interest in American religion doubtless began in the 1950s and ’60s at Everybody’s, Fort Worth’s first real discount store. All kinds of people shopped at Everybody’s, but not everyone was treated equally.