What if everything you knew about race was wrong? Robin Shaw revisits America’s longest standing public health crisis.
Race
You’re Not Being Persecuted for Your Beliefs
Susannah Black
Six months ago, as the pandemic spread across America, mayors and governors ordered the closure of many places where members of the public come together in proximity—including, of course, churches. Are these restrictions sensible and appropriate, coming from those...
First Things
Anne Snyder
When it comes to the social divisions of our time, it’s easy to baptize the reigning ideological currents rather than face them from a quiet core of christological insight. In this week’s feature essay, “Is God Anti-racist?,” Amy Julia Becker gropes for tools that...
Is God Anti-racist?
Amy Julia Becker
When it comes to the social divisions of our time, rather than baptizing either the fervent individualism of the right or the punishing collectivism of the left, is the American church capable of offering a different kind of answer altogether? If not, what muscles need strengthening—and then healing—so that we can?
A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew
Anne Snyder
The pages of Ecclesiastes have often flipped hastily under my thumb, Solomon’s more fatalistic thoughts unnerving to a soul seeking to understand God’s patterns, not more reminders of our own. But the much-popularized passage in chapter 3—“To everything there is a...
Deep Solidarity
Emmanuel Katongole
Jake Meador: Let’s get right into a topic you’ve written about recently: why violence and corruption continue to plague so many countries in Africa. In your book The Sacrifice of Africa, you argue that the reason for this is not the failure of the nation-state in...
Portland: On the Ground
Patrick Tomassi
“Liberal friends wondered if we were being rounded up by the Gestapo. Conservative friends wanted to know if Antifa were burning our houses down. I decided to see for myself.” One Portland native’s account of the city’s summer of struggle – and the moral messiness of policing, protests, riots, and responses.
Reading While Black
David Emmanuel Goatley
Black people often do not fit easily into popular Western European or North American paradigms. Widely accepted patterns of thought and being have for too long now been conceived and constructed by those who presume their particular worldviews to be normative for all....
The Holy Trinity, Race, and a Time of Crisis
Ken Herfst
Our societies are in the middle of a crisis. The pandemic is asking us to think about what it means to be human living in community—not only with other people but also with the rest of creation, including animals—especially if it’s true that the virus originated from...
Race, Relationships, and Repentance
Dwan Dandridge, Chris Lambert
Bridge-building and breaking down barriers can sound innocuous enough, even praiseworthy, but what’s the underside of the embroidered tapestry? Dwan Dandridge and Chris Lambert have been doing this work in Detroit for some years now, and aren’t afraid of the mess.