Religion Dispatches
…Church, Unitarian in Washington, D.C. sent about 200 people to the march; James Reeb had been an associate pastor at All Souls before answering a similar call from Martin Luther King and being murdered in Selma. (Full disclosure: I am a member of All Souls.) On Saturday morning before the march, the North Carolina Council of Churches convened an interfaith prayer gathering in front of the state legislative building. It was attended by dozens of c…
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…lity to the civil rights movement. With the likes of Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson aligning their activism to include their lesbian, transgendered, bisexual and queer sisters and brothers, that bond is inextricably connected to the furtherance of civil rights for all humanity. This still has not satisfied many African American clergy. Jamal-Harrison Bryant, pastor of Empowerment Temple AME Church in Baltimore famously went on CNN to denounce…
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…s marriage equality, but that people who oppose it can continue to do so because of their rights protected under the Constitution. Bree Newsome is in jail. Can you name a single person in jail for expressing anti-gay views?…
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…and homes of the most theologically conservative white men in America: Dr. James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, John Ashcroft, Billy Graham, George W. Bush, et al. These alliances between black and white Christians, wedded by shared Christian orientations, confound the prophetic and progressive view of the Black Church. And they speak volumes about why prophetic religion and progressive politics do not characterize the language and ethos of t…
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…l for abuse when religion and politics mix. But the thought of a President John McCain makes me even more nervous. So I’m prepared to cut Obama some slack on this one. His job is to win the election. He is running far behind among whites who are regular churchgoers and say religion is important in their daily lives. He’ll gain more votes with all this faith talk than he’ll lose. He has to bend over backwards to prove that he is a real Christian, s…
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…e lead, and African-American religious leaders, apart from Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, have been mostly silent on the Tea Party issue. Perhaps, then, Eddie Glaude had a point about the black church being dead. Though it may not be dead as an entity, as a cohesive force of social change it’s clearly not the force it once was. Some of the same conservative black Christians who are also NAACP members, for instance, might be also followers of the a…
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…ity cannot put it out. For it was a queer son of the black holiness church—James Baldwin—who reminded us that God gave Moses a rainbow sign: no more water but fire now. May this season be greeted with your willingness to come to the streets; taste and see the new things that God is doing in the Earth. As it was then, so it is now: wise men bring gifts of reverence to poor children born to nothing because they are our salvation. Your son, Rev. Osag…
Read More…problems would be solved. But when Gingrich appeared at a town hall at the Jones Memorial AME Zion Church in Columbia, South Carolina, on Saturday, he did not flash his Christianist talking points. Surely he knew what sort of religious angle would inspire here, being a student of American history, an aficianado of its religions (because, after all, he also knows how dangerous Muslims are and what Jews think), an expert on the nation’s essential Ch…
Read More…r rights and privileges. Rather, it is about negotiating the boundaries of American-ness. From yesterday’s RNS blog post by political science prof Daniel Bennett: [S]ame-sex marriage is about more than morality or ideology. It is about how people view the United States of America. *It’s been brought to my attention that this post could be read as an implication of plagiarism, which was the furthest thing from my mind. I meant only to highlight how…
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…hurch’s front porch. Four young girls died and 22 other congregants were injured. Only a few of the perpetrators were ever prosecuted. In 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador was celebrating mass in a small chapel attached to a hospital. He had just finished preaching a sermon calling on Salvadoran soldiers to resist their superiors’ orders to engage in state-sponsored terrorism. Moments later, Romero took his place at the center of the al…
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