civil rights

Mitt’s Jesus, Barack’s Jesus, and Why Christ’s Color Matters

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By tracking the way Jesus Christ has been rendered through the American racial imagination—actually lining up all the evidence, from Puritan witch trial transcripts through stained glass windows through contemporary movies—Paul and Ed give us a new place to start a national discussion about who owns the image of God. That discussion has been going on, as The Color of Christ demonstrates, in communities of color since the early nineteenth century, if not before.

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Why I Will Not See The Help: A Rant

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I will not go to see the movie The Help because already I have encountered and regularly encounter enough messages suggesting history is made only by white agency. I will not go to see the movie The Help because I do not wish to view yet another production that tells me, a black woman, it is all about whiteness.

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Whose God in America?

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I must admit, I was pretty excited when I heard about God in America. My husband and I are big PBS fans. As the show proceeded, however, I became increasingly annoyed. We moved from the Franciscans to the Puritans, with John Winthrop ostensibly treating Anne Hutchinson as badly as the Franciscans had the Pueblos. But it seems there were no indigenous people at all in New England in those days—or else they and the Puritans got on extremely well.

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