Category: Race
The Legacy of Lena Horne
In the spring of 2010, I accepted a job with a student tour company to lead a group of middle schoolers from Anniston, Alabama, around New York City. This group wanted a tour that highlighted Black history and culture, and...
An Interview with Isaac Adams on “Talking About Race”
Isaac Adams serves as lead pastor at Iron City Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and is the founder of United? We Pray, a ministry devoted to praying about racial justice. The following transcripted interview revolves around his book, Talking About Race:...
An Education for Lincoln’s Heaven
In a 2013 article on ‘Christian Schooling and Racial Realities,’ Hunter Baker concluded that while “the racial unification of the American church might best begin in the Christian schoolhouse” he lamented that it is a “mission … awaiting a champion...
Critical Race Theory, Campus Culture, and Reformed Theology
No diploma and no graduation, that was the punishment. Five students had organized a large public protest on their university campus. A scholar who opposed the #blacklivesmatter movement had come to their school to deliver a public lecture. In response,...
The Danger of Forgetting America’s Anti-Racist History
Jake Meador has offered a thoughtful and challenging piece concerning the relationship between Christianity and the United States. Meador’s most salient point is that he has “become very suspicious of accounts of Christianity’s place in American life that leave out...
On Healing: Learning from Separatists
The idea of a black nation seems so far-fetched as to be ludicrous, but if you entertain it for a minute, even as an impossible dream, it should give you a feeling of wholeness and belonging you’ve never had and...
Black Patriotism and National Conservatism
I watched Glenn Loury’s address at the second National Conservatism conference around the time of the event with great interest. Since then, I’ve also seen the print version of it in First Things. You can view the video of the...
Book Review: Black Fundamentalists by Daniel Bare
Daniel Bare. Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 272 pp, $30. I was born and raised in the Pentecostal church, steeped and simmered in the rhythms of the AOG...
Racial Reconciliation and the Queen of the Sciences
In the 2013 book Aliens in the Promised Land, editor Anthony Bradley along with a number of other people of color who have served in predominantly white evangelical institutions explain in great detail why, as the subtitle has it, “minority...
Cultural Assimilation and the Curious Cases of Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal
After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, educator Jane Elliot held an experiment with her elementary school students that she called “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes.” The experiment became famous, and she repeated it for various audiences for years,...