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...
“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?”
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...
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...
The concept of humanity’s being divisible into different races has no scientific validity. This has always been the case, even before the advent of rapid global travel enabled the further mixing of pe...
Hebrews 12:1-2, Matthew 6:33, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, Psalm 34:17, John 14:27
Prayer of Adoration Living and present Lord: You often surprise us, coming when we least expect it; or, You simply fold back the curtain to show us You’ve been there all along to give us hope and to ...
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...
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...
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...
John 11:32-35, Acts 10:, John 5:1-9, Luke 10:25-37, Ephesians 4:3-6, Matthew 25:40
God of love—Father, Son and Holy Spirit: You loved us before we ever knew You. Give us such a deep love for You, that we can see the world as You see it, feel the compassion You feel, and be a people ...
Children, who made your skin white? Was it not God? Who made mine black? Was it not the same God? Am I to blame, therefore, because my skin is black? ...Root up, if possible, the great sin of prejudic...
The following article was originally written for the author’s denominational newsletter as part of the celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It is meant to provide some insights into t...
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...
Perhaps there is no object more desired than a house in America. Meghan Daum writes in her hilarious and poignant book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, “There is no object of desire qui...
A Theological Giant's Final Word Walter Brueggemann’s passing on June 5, 2025 leaves a void in biblical scholarship that will last a very long time. He was still writing books and essays at age 9...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Holy and just Lord, we come before you today guilty. Guilty of reducing Jesus in our minds and hearts. At times we make him our personal savior, forgetting that his love and mercy are for all tongues,...
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...
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...
Lamin Sanneh, the African theologian who would be pivotal in the development of missional theology, was raised in an orthodox Muslim household in Gambia. He found himself drawn to Christianity after e...
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...
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 ...
“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...
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...
Racism springs from the lie that certain human beings are less than fully human. It’s a self-centered falsehood that corrupts our minds into believing we are right to treat others as we would not want...
James 2:1-9, Leviticus 19:15, Deuteronomy 1:17, Romans 2:1-11
When I went to seminary to prepare for the ministry, I met an African-American student, Elward Ellis, who befriended both my future wife, Kathy Kristy, and me. He gave us gracious but bare-knuckled me...