history on Slavery

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...

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...

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...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? The Old, Old Story Jesus’ resurrection and ascension (and perhaps Pentecost) are the resolution of a story that starts with all the way...

A major stumbling block for many earnest seekers is the compelling evidence throughout history that terrible things have been done in the name of religion. This applies to virtually all faiths at some...

We've decided to wait until the middle of February to celebrate Black History Month, not to push it off, but to spread out and celebrate Black history and culture throughout the entire month, whil...

Some skeptics today speak about “evolving” from a primitive condition, but the Bible (Romans 1:18-32) sadly portrays a  descent  rather than an ascent. The result has been given the theological term “...

A source of the intensest pleasure earthlings can experience, sex has also been a source of vexatious trouble for the human family since the beginning of history.

By many accounts the first Muslim in America was Estevancio of Azamor, a Moroccan guide for a Spanish expedition in 1528 that landed in Florida. A couple of centuries later, as many as a third of the ...

Mighty One In your justice In your mercy bring equity to your world raise up all who suffer from discrimination  break the rod of oppression and prejudice free us from our addiction to violence and d...

“This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the sam...

Rodney King had led the police on a high speed chase through Los Angeles. Eventually the police got him to stop, and after he exited the car, he was savagely beaten by four officers. The entire countr...

History, n. an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

In the history of man it has been very generally the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure.

Two-thirds of the story of redemption is known to Christians as the Old Testament. Yet in the decades that I have been teaching Bible, I have found that most Christians, if allowed to answer honestly,...

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentious, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for...

Pastor: You are the LORD, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; ...

On April 12, 1963, eight clergy—two Methodist bishops, two Episcopal bishops, one Roman Catholic Bishop, a Rabbi, a Presbyterian, and a Baptist—wrote a letter addressed to the citizens of Alabama. Thi...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Kingdom Reversals This parable of Jesus is like the other two before it (cf., Matt. 21:28–32, 33–44) in that its focus is on kingdom reversals. Continuing the theme begun in Matt. 20:1–16 where the l...

Precisely how a man nailed to a cross 2,000 years ago, who claimed to be the Son of God, came to signify reality, in contradiction to the sawdust men of destiny with their fraudulent wars and revoluti...

When someone promises us something wonderful, we can hardly wait for that promise to be fulfilled. If the promise is something good, we want it now! We really don’t like to wait. And yet the very best...

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

The call to ‘believe in the gospel’, or to ‘believe in me’, does not suggest that Jesus was inviting Galilean villagers to embrace a body of doctrine — not even a basic ‘theory’ about ‘salvation’ and ...

History is a story written by the finger of God.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden the Romans setting a military guard lest there...