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A History of Prophetic Black Preaching That Doesn’t Start or End With Dr. King

…y is a message that hopes to reconfigure the facts: clergy leaders working today are all johnny-come-latelies to a venerable tradition traceable to the message of the Hebrew prophets. We preachers who have come of age in the 21st century stand on tall shoulders and drink from cisterns and wells we did not dig. I, just as King, am a progenitor of a distinctive prophetic preaching tradition born from struggle, one that carries a justice-seeking and…

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The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

…ter taught an entire generation of kids (the ones who sit in my classrooms today) about the importance of loyalty, friendship, and studying for exams. The book of Revelation—or any other apocalyptic text—is not a handbook to how the end times will unfold, but that does not mean apocalyptic literature does not matter. The end of the world is simultaneously always and never here. Type “mark of the Beast” into Google: just recently a man in West Virg…

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‘Religious Liberty’ and the Origins of the Evangelical Persecution Complex

…d Boston’s CBS Radio affiliate that there was more political and religious freedom in Oxford, Mississippi, than there was in Boston. A similar discourse of embattlement and doom predominates today. Christian psychologist and childcare expert James Dobson recently warned: “barring a miracle, the family that has existed since antiquity will likely crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.” In apocalyptic tones reminiscent of fundam…

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Come Out From Among Them

…in America has improved considerably since Tharpe’s and Cleveland’s time, today the resistance within evangelical popular culture toward non-heterosexuals may be, if anything, intensifying in far more overt and punishing ways than in times past. While Cleveland dominated gospel music for two generations despite the open secret of his homosexuality, the only performers today who have been as widely known to be gay, while also maintaining a career…

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Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

…sident of the United States understands Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card used to freely exercise open bigotry, it can seem pretty conclusive that power has prevailed over justice. But consider some other words of Daniel Berrigan’s: “Redeem the times! The times are inexpressibly evil. Christians pay conscious, indeed religious tribute, to Caesar and Mars . . . And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good, solaced by the courage a…

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Solidarity Through Veiling? Backlash Has Been “Personal, Fierce and Vile…”

…ent in a country like Egypt was rare and a far cry from the pandemic it is today with a <90% hijab rate among Muslims. People who know women from these cultures today understand the tremendous pressure all Muslim women can be under to veil. The pressure can be so severe that one does have to problematize notions of “choice” in some contexts. – In view of this last point: something happened to change these societies. Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolutio…

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From Christian Temperance to D.A.R.E. — The War on Drugs Has its Roots in White Christian Nationalism

…g the 1912 “Men and Religion Forward” movement—a national revival aimed at promoting the kingdom—Hobson shared the stage of the Brooklyn Tabernacle with Booker T. Washington and claimed that African Americans would degenerate into cannibals if they were permitted to drink alcohol. Christians, he felt, needed to lead the world toward sobriety through law, through example, and through education. Hobson’s take on drugs was quite similar. After Prohib…

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How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

…nt masculinity to contemporary American evangelical culture, claiming that today’s devout have “replaced the Jesus of the gospels with an idol of machismo …” For some of the authors, the cultural and political commitments of many of today’s evangelicals have become so distasteful to their normative understanding of the faith as to render the term “evangelical” useless. As historian Thomas Kidd puts it in one of his reprinted essays, the invocation…

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Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

…sident of the United States understands Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card used to freely exercise open bigotry, it can seem pretty conclusive that power has prevailed over justice. But consider some other words of Daniel Berrigan’s: “Redeem the times! The times are inexpressibly evil. Christians pay conscious, indeed religious tribute, to Caesar and Mars . . . And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good, solaced by the courage a…

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On Historic “Decision Day,” SCOTUS Sends LGBT Americans Mixed Messages

…it’s ready to reconsider the weight granted to legal claims of “religious freedom.” In a not-unexpected decision issued today in favor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbus, Missouri, seven justices concluded that a state program that reimbursed organizations which used scrap tire rubber to resurface playgrounds, but denied those grants to religious institutions, violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The ruling itself, writte…

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