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...
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 ...
For years, Bible scholars have danced around the matter by saying slavery in Rome was far different from slavery in the first few centuries of American history. No doubt their observations carry a mea...
The first thing to notice is that violence is intentional. For example, one of the most brutal forms of violence affecting millions of poor women and girls in our world is sex trafficking. Lured a...
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 ...
A few weeks after our Christmas at the DPAC, I visited Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Church, a quaint chapel one town over from Durham in Hillsborough, North Carolina. This place was never a megachurch, b...
What Paul does is transform the master-slave relationship by insisting that both masters and slaves have the same heavenly Lord and are accountable to him. The emphasis is on mutual responsibility und...
This prayer may be offered with or without the congregational response. Due to its length, consider using two or more liturgists to lead the prayer. VOICE ONE: God of Creation, God of Life, In your j...
Perhaps no statistic reminds us more graphically of the distortion of power in our world than this: there are twenty-one million slaves in the world today. They labor as brick makers, coffee harvester...
Thomas Costain’s history, The Three Edwards, described the life of Raynald III, a fourteenth-century duke in what is now Belgium. Grossly overweight, Raynald was commonly called by his Latin nickname,...
Lord, you know we are a hard-hearted people. We are prideful. We are stubborn. We are disloyal. We are like the people of Israel who were freed from slavery in Egypt by your powerful right hand, but t...
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 ...
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...
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...
Context I had a Bible professor in college who liked to say, “All Scripture is cultural!” He didn’t mean that the truth of who God is changes in different cultures. What he meant was that our God ch...
Context I had a Bible professor in college who liked to say, “All Scripture is cultural!” He didn’t mean that the truth of who God is changes in different cultures. What he meant was that our God ch...
In his excellent book, Woke Church , Eric Mason shares a personal account of watching people being sold into slavery in real-time with his family: “CNN released an exclusive report in October 201...
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...
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...
What do you say to someone who is suffering? And what do you say when it is not just that they are in pain, but that they are being harassed and singled out for violence or slander because of their fa...
What do you say to someone who is suffering? And what do you say when it is not just that they are in pain, but that they are being harassed and singled out for violence or slander because of their fa...
This historical context unveils the truth that evangelicalism and white evangelicalism happen to be at least four-hundred-or-so-year-old conjoined twins who have never been separated in their lives. T...
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...
Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, President Lincoln was purported to have said that it was nice to meet the woman who started the Civil War. Stowe’s father was among...
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...
Micah 6:8, Exodus 22:21-22 , Isaiah 58:6-7 , Matthew 22:37-39, James 2:1-9 , Psalm 103:6
We cannot have true justice unless it is motivated by love, just as God’s greatest act of justice, sending Jesus to die for us, was motivated by love. Years ago, before the emancipation of slaves, Fre...
Sarah Grimke, the daughter of a slaveholder and judge in Charleston, South Carolina, was five years old in 1797 when the sight of an enslaved person being whipped seared her conscience. Like many whit...
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 ...
Proverbs 22:7-11, 1 Samuel 8:10 , Mark 16:9-20, Psalm 60:, 1 Kings 17:8-16, Daniel 6:10, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, Luke 17:11-19, Luke 17:11-19, Psalm 136:1
Charles Fulton Oursler Sr. (1893–1952) was an American journalist, playwright, editor, and writer. Like many Southerners of means, he was cared for as a boy by a nurse who had been born into slavery. ...