Arts and Culture on Slavery

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Author

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Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of me...

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Defending Slavery as the Status Quo

Author

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Keywords

Status Quo

I read that Thornton Stringfellow, pastor of the Stevensburg Baptist Church in Virginia, had made one of the most popular arguments for slavery when Baptists in the mid-nineteenth century were decidin...

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How being a Slave Shaped their Reading of Scripture

Author

Esau McCaulley

Keywords

Scripture

Galatians 3:28

The social location of enslaved persons caused them to read the Bible differently. This unabashedly located reading has marked African American interpretation since. Did this social location mean Blac...

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The Narrative of Racial Difference

Author

Bryan Stevenson

Keywords

In this excerpt by Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney and author of Just Mercy, explains the origins of racial identity and difference, necessitated by a slave-based (American Christian) socie...

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The Story of Amazing Grace

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

John Newton authored one of the most beloved hymns for English-speaking black Christians in the world, yet he spent his early life transporting African slaves to the New World. He was born in 1725, w...

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A Christianity for Those with their Backs Against the Wall

Author

Howard Thurman

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 3:7–10, Isaiah 58:6–10 , Amos 5:21–24, Luke 4:16–21, James 2:1–7, Psalm 9:9–10

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent th...

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Let us pray. Almighty, powerful,

Author

Jacob Traeger

Keywords

Let us pray. Almighty, powerful, creator God So often we think we know best. We confess to you our sin alongside the sin of all humanity. We have tried to master creation rather than care for it. We ...

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God, you call us to prayer. Throughout

Author

Ellen R. Dawson

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 2:23-25, 1 Samuel 1:10-11, 1 Kings 3:9-12, Acts 4:29-31, Luke 7:37-38, Exodus 3:7-10, Esther 4:16

God, you call us to prayer. Throughout the Scriptures, we read about your people praying. The Israelites cried out for you to rescue them from slavery. You sent them Moses. Hannah wept, asking you t...

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The Expediency of White Supremacism

Author

Ken Wytsma

Keywords

In order to justify colonialism, an idea like white supremacy was needed. The concept that whites were chosen by God and superior to people of color, who were less intelligent, less deserving, and sav...

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Independence Day to the African Slave

Author

Esau McCaulley

Keywords

When Frederick Douglass asked his famous question, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” he didn’t simply ask a question about the United States of America . He asked a question about Amer...

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Losing Your Name

Author

Bonnie Greer

Keywords

The most poignant and powerful time for me in the film 12 Years a Slave was not when the beatings took place or the general degradation meted out to the hero as a matter of course or even the general ...

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Differences in Economics from the Ancient World to Ours

Author

Ben Witherington III

Keywords

At this point in the discussion some will remark that the Old Testament says a good deal about being prosperous and even occasionally speaks about wealth, but not about money per se. That is the case ...

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"Pure" Christianity and A Slave-Based Christianity

In this short excerpt, the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass describes the tension between faith in Christ and faith in a form of Christianity willing to enslave an entire race of peopl...

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Paul and Onesimus

Author

Melinda Joy Mingo

Keywords

Scripture

Romans 15:7, Matthew 18:21-22, 1 Corinthians 12:13, Romans 12:10, Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:13

One of my favorite Bible illustrations of someone willing to go against the norms of society to befriend another based on love and forgiveness is found in the New Testament book of Philemon. It is a m...

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Thinking Biblically about Work and Ownership

Author

Ben Witherington III

Keywords

In modern Western culture we place a high value on work, which is fine, but one of the philosophical assumptions that can come with such values is that we assume that we own what we earn or buy. From ...

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The Founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church

Author

Esau McCaulley

Keywords

Scripture

Luke 1:1-4, Galatians 4:4-7

The African Methodist Episcopal Church began when Richard Allen and Absalom Jones demanded an equal place in the Methodist Episcopal Church and were refused. In their preaching and teaching, jus...

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Elephants Chains’ and Self-Limiting Beliefs

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Have you ever wondered how people keep elephants, whether at a circus or as means of transport throughout Asia, from throwing off their shackles and marching to their own tune? A single metal chain is...

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Spirituals and Suffering

Author

Luke A. Powery

Keywords

There is no lack of pain and suffering in the world. Look around. Read the newspaper. Click on the Internet. Scroll Facebook or read a tweet. Suffering is always present like the paparazzi. It seems t...

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God blessed them, and God said to them,

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:28, Genesis 2:15, Exodus 20:9-10, Psalm 90:17

God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth' Lord be with those who work and worship The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to ti...

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God of all nations and peoples, Lord of

Author

Roy Pearson

Keywords

God of all nations and peoples, Lord of all places and lands, who didst form man of the dust of the ground, and make of him a living soul, we praise thee for the infinite variety of thy human creature...

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A Venomous Creature At Your Bosom

Author

Frederick Douglass

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 25:40, Jeremiah 22:3, James 2:1, Psalm 82:3-4, Micah 6:8

Frederick Douglass describes how the evils of slavery and racism acts as a sap on the integrity of both our country and our faith in a God where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free: Fello...

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The Original Sin of Racism

Author

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Keywords

Racism

The original sin of racism in America began with a deeply flawed and demonic notion that shaped this nations development. Bad science claimed that black bodies were biologically deficient, then extrap...

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Curious About Oregon

Author

D. L. Mayfield

Keywords

The Latin root of curiosity means “cure,” which makes me wonder if it isn’t a way to heal some of our oldest sicknesses. Like, perhaps, the “amnesia of affluence” that theologians point out in the Bib...

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The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Author

James Cone

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 61:1, Jeremiah 22:3, Micah 6:8, James 1:27, Matthew 25:35-36, Psalm 82:3-4, Isaiah 58:6-7

In the wake of slavery and the Civil War, there was so much ugliness in black life that one would have had to be blind not to see it. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was uglier than lynching in all o...

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The Birth (or Re-Emergence) of Evangelical Social Action

Author

Soong-Chan Rah

Keywords

In 1947, budding theologian Carl F. H. Henry wrote a short book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he surveys the American fundamentalist movement’s engagement with the most ...

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The Theological Roots of Apartheid

Author

Brenda Salter McNeil

Keywords

Did you know that apartheid in South Africa was based in large part on theological doctrines that were formed at Stellenbosch University in the 1930s and 1940s? Isn’t that chilling? Many of the intell...

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Coming To Terms with Institutional Racism

Author

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Keywords

Racism

Christians in America must come to terms with how institutional racism has infected us. Few white persons in twenty-first-century America see themselves as racist. (Even fewer Asian, Latino, or Africa...

Quote

Author

Robert Herrick

Keywords

Who covets more, is evermore a slave.

Quote

Author

G. K. Chesterton

Keywords

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—“free-love”—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and...

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The Concept of “Race” a Recent Development

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The etymology of the word race, as used with regard to people, can be traced only to the sixteenth century. Around 1500 the English word race carried the sense of a group with a common occupation; by ...

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