Joint article by Lisa Sharon Harper and David P. Gushee. Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison. — Mark 6:27 On the day we write this post, during the week Tyre Nichols was buried after being murdered by Memphis police …
Black America flipped the script on a racialized democratic state to make it more perfect. It is Black people’s fight that makes the United States exceptional. —Randal Jelks (2022) Many of us are profoundly worried about the health of American democracy. If so, we need to attend deeply to the deadly contradiction between structural racism and …
The Black Resistance Tradition and Its Fight for U.S. Democracy
I was talking with someone very close to me recently who said something important I want to share: Our country has so many things going wrong, so many things really to feel ashamed about in a way, that it seems like on an average day I have two choices: either think about those things and then …
I learned this week that sales of my 2014 book Changing Our Mind are just about to cross 25,000, apparently very rare in the book business. This becomes the occasion for my column this week. Long-time readers of Baptist News Global will remember that this book originated as a series of posts on this site beginning in the summer of 2014. …
At one level, the Christian debate about the morality of war is ancient and timeless. Juxtaposed against the ubiquitous warfare of human history stands Jesus Christ, who taught enemy-love, nonretaliation and peacemaking, and went to his death on the Cross without defending himself. Anyone who takes the Gospel accounts of Jesus at all seriously must be …
This is a column about crises and injustices in the health care system in America. I interpret these crises and injustices as an indictment on the character and the governance of this country. What follows is inspired by hard personal experience but relevant to all who have ears to hear. I make the following five claims: …
Dietrich Bonhoeffer always brings me up short when he emphasizes the indicative rather than imperative voice in Paul’s thought and in Christian ethics more broadly. For example, in terms of Bonhoeffer’s work on image Christology, he emphasizes that the work of Christ in restoring the image of God in humanity is an accomplished fact, a reality …
Christ Came to Make Us Truly Human: Social Ethics and the Image of Christ
The hysteria over Critical Race Theory right now means many things. Most immediately, it means that the relationship between skilled right-wing demagogues and their audience in the U.S. these days is positively Pavlovian. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, rinse and repeat. If Tucker Carlson says over several nights on Fox News that Critical Race Theory is a huge threat …
White hysteria, Critical Race Theory, and eyes that dare not see
On Palm Sunday in my Bible study class at First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., I was slated to teach this parable of Jesus. It is one of my favorites. Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to…
The post A Holy Week reflection on justice and…