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...
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,...
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...
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...
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 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?”
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
The ways that social structures and institutions systematically work against the interest of people of color is called institutional racism. Institutional racism and historic racism are not unrelated ...
Years ago I was watching a daytime talk show which focused on interracial romantic relationships. On this show, the father of a white woman did not approve of his daughter’s engagement to a black man....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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.
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...
Romans 12:20-21, Matthew 5:44, James 2:1, Proverbs 16:7, Ephesians 2:14-16
I was driving in Columbus, Ohio, when I came upon a hitchhiker who alternated between holding his thumb out and clasping his hands together as if he were praying. I picked him up. His name was Mike, a...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...