Religion Dispatches
…er seen such an overt display of Christianity in a professional office. In Atlanta, where I had moved from, such displays would never have appeared or been tolerated by patients or customers. I began to notice it all around in my professional encounters at the doctor’s office and again in the dentist chair when I realized the office had tuned in the local Christian music station. I only noticed because the dental hygienist began to sing along with…
Read More…properties totaling around 25 million in mortgage debt. Similar is true in Atlanta with Bishop Weeks. Last month sheriff deputies evicted the Global Destiny Church from its facility as the landlord reports not having received a payment since July. Bishop Week’s domestic violence guilty plea and the subsequent loss of over half of his membership surely explains why the ministry is currently more than $400,000 behind in rent and fees. To be sure, my…
Read More
…mething to Say.” Moving from the margins of the culture to its center, the Atlanta emcee was putting the hip-hop community on notice that Southern rappers had their own style. They didn’t need to imitate the content, norms, and styles of their East Coast and West Coast colleagues, because they had a distinct and culturally-rooted approach to the genre. Similarly, in the wake of public outcries about antisemitism and religious animosity, Andre3000’…
Read More
…are a crappy Christian!” Ben Shapiro: “I am the square root of a negative number.” It should be said this is Warnock’s opinion. People are entitled to theirs. A difference of opinion, however, isn’t why Erickson and his ghouls are reacting so strongly. They are trying to discredit his religion. They are trying to delegitimize his faith. And they are doing this because Warnock, as the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Mart…
Read More…Georgia’s former GOP House minority leader, Bob Irvin, blasted Reed in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed. “His M.O. is to tell evangelical Christians that his cause of the moment, for which he has been hired, is their religious duty,” Irvin fumed. “As an evangelical myself, I resent Christianity being used simply to help Reed’s business.” Irvin’s dart went straight to the heart of the matter. While grassroots organizing has been the key to li…
Read More
Lucia Hulsether is a freshman at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. A while back, she got in touch with RD to see if we were interested in having someone on the ground, covering the college beat. We were, absolutely. She mentioned that she talked a lot to her father Mark, a religion prof, about religious studies (her intended major), and about politics, and about teaching. The chance to listen in on father-daughter religion talk struck us here at RD…
Read More…g the powers that be. Think Booker T. Washington who, with his famous 1895 Atlanta Compromise Address, appealed to the economic aspirations of African Americans with his Tuskegee model of vocational training and gospel of entrepreneurialism. Yet it was this same Negro leader who was willing to assuage the anxieties of poor white Southerners and wealthy Northern philanthropists by eschewing the goals of social equality and civic participation for h…
Read More
…e their precious travel funds on attending meetings such as the SPS, and people like me. The rest of us? I will see you in Atlanta in November….
Read More…anymore. I grew up on Chick-fil-A and always enjoyed them as a teenager at Atlanta Braves games. When I was slimming down on Weight Watchers, Chick-fil-A was always my “go-to” healthy choice for low points and delicious food (the grilled chicken, not the regular sandwich, mind you). I will miss the chicken, but not the greasy aftertaste of bigotry… But, back to Merritt, there is so much to be sad about here. I’ve always been torn on the issue of “…
Read More
…se spaces, without disruption. Whiteness invisibilizes its operations in a number of ways. It depends on rendering racial surfaces as real, the origins of race as natural, and morality as singular. The affective clarity of whiteness—its conviction in mapping the world and organizing non-white bodies—allows for it to entangle itself with our closely held myths. So the deeper and more difficult reckoning for Christians is how Christianity in the mod…
Read More