Category: Race
Book Review: White Too Long by Robert P. Jones
It is no secret (and impossible, frankly, to say otherwise) that American Christianity has broadly taken the shape that it has because of race. This is not a monocausal argument for American church history which would undermine other factors such...
Book Review: How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
Racial injustice has become an unavoidable topic for American Christianity. It challenges all levels of relational unity, from large ecclesial networks to personal friendships. When relational unity is challenged and fractured, we naturally search for the source of the problem,...
Keeping Vaclav Benda’s Door Open
I don’t think there’s anyone better to explain to Rod Dreher where he went wrong in his recent posts about the death of George Floyd than Rod Dreher. When I wrote to him (Update #8 in that linked post), I...
Race and Black Theology Reading List: An Annotated Bibliography
By the Mere O Editors The ongoing evils of police brutality have revealed to a wider (and whiter) audience the structural and systematic prejudices under which blacks live in the USA, and in many other places around the world. White...
Ahmaud Arbery and “National Conversations”
Under ordinary circumstances, the arrest of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers might have prompted another national conversation on race, which is what we call it when family members who don’t talk in real life argue on Facebook, and invite long-lost high school...
Thinking Christianly About the Ahmaud Arbery Lynching
Let’s start here. This is what we know about what happened in February in Brunswick GA when Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed according to the New York Times: BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Ahmaud Arbery loved to run. It was how...
Lynching Then and Lynching Now: Racial Justice as Christian Imperative
The United States has a long history of racial terror lynchings. Particularly from the Civil War until this day, thousands of Black men, women and children have been indiscriminately killed for a myriad of reasons. When that killing took place...
The Tribe of Ishmael: Whiteness and Christian Identity
In 1889, an Indianapolis pastor named Oscar McCulloch gave a speech that empowered the development of eugenics in America. McCulloch had studied the Ishmaelites, a poor, white, extended family, and named his speech, “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in...
Suffering Our Forefathers’ Sins: A Latino’s Reflection on White Supremacy
Two Saturdays ago mi esposa and I mourned for those devastated by the El Paso shooting. For us, this hit home. We had lived in the Lone Star State for seven years, our daughter was born there, and we have...
Post-Liberalism and American Racism
Recently Adam Serwer published a piece in The Atlantic characterizing the current conversation about liberalism amongst American conservatives as essentially being a sustained, intellectualized temper tantrum thrown over their loss of power. Ross Douthat has done the main work in critiquing...