All that I ever really needed to know about uncivil language I learned in the fifth grade. At a small Dutch Calvinist school in a New Jersey city, I was playing with other students just before classes...
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...
Split second decisions can reveal prejudices that we aren't aware of ourselves. This is particularly important in split-second decisions with life-or-death consequences, such as police officers ha...
In her short story Revelation, Flannery O’Connor describes a woman sitting in a Doctor’s office, gossiping away without concern for who hears her questionable commentary: This woman says to hersel...
“If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?”
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...
People know about the Klan and the overt racism, but the killing of one’s soul little by little, day after day, is a lot worse than someone coming in your house and lynching you.
I was sixteen when a white deputy sheriff shot and killed my twenty-five-year-old brother, Clyde, in New Hebron, Mississippi, where we had grown up. Clyde had returned home from fighting in World War ...
O God of the ages, you have created each of us uniquely. We each have so much that makes us interesting and unique! Yet at times, even against our own wishes, we find ourselves falling prey to the -is...
I know most Americans today do not worship Baal, but when I look at the church in America, I fear that we have our own Baals that demand our worship. I see so many people bowing down before prosperity...
My kids love the movie Remember the Titans . It’s the story of the integration of the TC WIlliams High School Football Team in Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1960s Civil Rights era. The white players a...
God of freedom, whether we like to admit it or not, we do not treat everybody with equality. We silently judge others based on appearance, social status, and even race. Please give us the courage to m...
In 1973, Voice of Calvary Ministries, the ministry Vera Mae and I started after we moved back to Mississippi in 1960, opened a health clinic in the black section of Mendenhall. We had an X-ray machine...
Matthew 25:40, Leviticus 19:15, Galatians 3:28, James 2:8-9, Amos 5:24, Micah 6:8, Isaiah 1:17
When did the topic of justice become important to you?” Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us wer...
In sovereign love, you, O God, created the world good And made everyone equally in your image, Male and female, of every race and people, To live as one community. But we rebel against you; we hid...
In Mendenhall, where the schools have actually integrated, we are seeing real equality form in the hearts of members of this new generation, and it is enriching for the entire community. When the scho...
“The Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii erupted on May 17, 2018, at 4:17 a.m., spewing lava more than a thousand feet in the air. Homes and other structures in the wake of the lava flow and the eruption’s rela...
Desegregation was one of the big goals of the civil rights movement. “Separate but equal” in the South became “separate and unequal.” The disparities were in things as small as water fountains and as ...
While I was sitting at a stoplight a few blocks from my [Emerson’s] home in Minneapolis, reflecting on the recent rash of drive-by shootings in the area, three African-American teens clad in the urban...
Exodus 5:1-21, 1 Samuel 8:4-22, Isaiah 1:10-17 , Matthew 23:23-28 , Galatians 3:26-29, Psalm 146:3-9
One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith is its wholesale appropriation of the larger culture. When this happens, the citizens of those places cannot recognize the difference between their cu...
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream that one day ri...
While I was born much too late to be the legal property of a person in America, I have been the recipient of racism. When a classmate called me a racial epithet in my first year of college, I was deva...
If you’ve ever wondered what the explicit goals are of the Klu Klux Klan, here is a definition offered by the organization itself: The goal of the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux ...
Mario told me I needed to listen to some Tupac. “Alright,” I said. “Let me hear his best stuff.” I didn’t tell Mario that, where I grew up, people who were saved didn’t listen to rap music. I’d been s...
One day while drinking coffee, laughing, and sharing stories with one of my best friends, who is white, an unexpected question about race came up. It just popped up out of nowhere as we were talking a...
Proverbs 18:21, Numbers 13:31-33, Deuteronomy 1:28, James 3:5-6, Exodus 14:12
Learned Helplessness can be easily seen in a research study when participants are given a math test. In this study, some participants are told, “men don’t tend to do well on this test,” or “Millennia...
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...
2 Chronicles 7:14, Luke 19:1-10, Luke 15:11-32, Isaiah 1:18, James 5:16
The Celebrant and People together, all kneeling Most holy and merciful Father: We confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinne...
Psalm 46:1, Matthew 11:28-30, Philippians 4:6-7, James 1:5, 1 Peter 5:7, Isaiah 41:10
Faithful and Good God–our Father, Redeemer and Companion. You know all about us–and love us anyhow; nothing we are or do surprises you or puts you off. Therefore, we turn to you with assurance and tru...