Religion Dispatches
…s, Denmark Vesey, was one of 35 black men hanged after “white residents of Charleston discovered that one of their worst fears had come true: a slave conspiracy to rise against their masters and slaughter all white residents was afoot in the city.” The church building was also burned to the ground. After last night’s murders, a YouTube user named Michael Adams has uploaded an undated video of Pinckney giving a floor speech in the South Carolina le…
Read More…adbeat dad. While no one suggested that unpaid child support could justify Scott’s murder, his debt proved that he was no “boy scout,” diminishing the impact of his murder. This familiar response—the suggestion that black victims are less worthy of mourning when they don’t live up to the standards of middle-class respectability—reveals that even when a video clearly shows a black man being shot in the back by a white police officer, the footage is…
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Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
Read More…ory told by a group of local Protestants who claimed to have heard a woman screaming as they passed the Carmelite convent—screams presumably produced by torture. Breckinridge’s demonizing of “nunneries” reached its apotheosis in 1839, when rumors about an escaped crazy nun prompted three days of rioting in Baltimore as a crowd tried to storm the convent. Only the protection of the city guard prevented the riots from turning deadly. Breckinridge, a…
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…Christians to love our black brothers and sisters not in a cloying or condescending way, but with real justice. In a nation marked by centuries of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws, legal segregation, and systemic racism, that is not easy to do. We are bound to feel defensive sometimes. If we listen, we are going to hear things we would rather not hear. Some of us are going to be tempted to buy into the vision of Glenn Beck and others who make it e…
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…ina of the anti-choice group 40 Days for Life, was a textbook example of unscientific anti-contraception propaganda peddled by the Catholic Bishops and their supporters. Nettina claimed the number of abortions increase with greater access to contraceptives, a trope commonly used to assert that contraception fails and therefore does not decrease the number of unintended pregnancies. This claim echoes statements made by the Bishops themselves, as we…
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…luding many sorrowful Episcopalians, who’ve given to a fund set up for Palermo’s children. It’s also a point made by Baltimore cyclists on New Year’s Day, during a memorial ride that drew 1500 bikers. Fittingly enough, the ride began in the parking lot of Baltimore’s Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation, and made its way to the place where Palermo was struck, now a roadside altar with a ghost bike marking the spot. Correction: Maryland Bishop Eu…
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…hite. At Salon, Arthur Chu notices this phenomenon in the reactions to the Charleston shooting. Norwegian writer and politician Shoaib Sultan made a similar point earlier this year in reference to the Anders Breivik terrorist attack from 2011. “If [Breivik’s attack] had been done by a Muslim guy, we would never have this prolonged discussion about mental health,” Sultan told The New York Review of Books. (Courts have declared that Breivik, a white…
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…emotions against forgiveness in the context of this particular tragedy in Charleston. The Christian obligation to forgive appears counter-intuitive to those within a Black Lives Matter moment who are angry and filled with righteous indignation, trying to discern the next move of rebellion or revolution. This is not a campaign to do away with forgiveness, but rather an effort to make the case that the black Christian experience needs to include an…
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…sire as dangerous and evil, for passion leads to a loss of control. Concupiscence describes the culture of shopping. As a Christian theologian Augustine will ultimately argue that ultimate satisfaction is found in God. As he writes in the opening lines of his Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” We can fool ourselves into thinking that material goods and wealth are the path to happiness, but ultimately Christians argue t…
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