Religion Dispatches
…a’s election as the 44th President of the United States in 2008 and Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. Symmetry can be aesthetically pleasing. Symbolically, we might be tempted to regard Obama’s inauguration as the end of a forty year “wilderness” experience. Before getting carried away with the symmetry and symbolism, however, we might very well need to pray that Obama’s administration is not in substance an extension of the reign of Kin…
Read More…was indeed in the leadership of an institution that was. In contrast, the King hearing seems to be the rankest kind of political hay-making, fear-mongering bigotry that lacks any basis in fact. In its use of political stagecraft, it reminds me of the McCarthy era hounding of godless and Soviet-sympathizing communists. That’s not to say that the bigots weren’t present in the Smoot hearing circus. Mormonism has always attracted haters, but the Sena…
Read More…und. In sketching this struggle, I will summon the voices of Martin Luther King, Jr., theologian Walter Brueggemann, and composer John Cage. And I’ll argue that the digital economy calls for a queer ethics, politics, and spirituality: one that is “tenderhearted,” as King put it, while “Cagey” in its ability to resist cultural oppression, without giving into what Brueggemann calls the “royal consciousness” of mainstream culture—that impulse to reta…
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…the project was Ralph Bunche, who later worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. Maafa 21 quotes descriptions of the mindsets of white racists in a way that implies that they’re Myrdal’s own views. It’s an ugly trick, and a mendacious one. There are, of course, very good reasons for minorities to be suspicious of population control. Black people have indeed been subject to involuntary sterilization and reproductive…
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This year, our national commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday coincided with Religious Freedom Day, marked as it has been for the past 27 years with a presidential proclamation. January 16 saw thousands take to the street in “marades” and marches intended to honor the life and legacy of one of the giants of the 20th century’s Civil Rights Movement (who would have turned 88 this month had he not been assassinated nearly…
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…understanding Zimmerman as Latino and his profiling or policing of Trayvon Martin. On that fateful night, between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin stood the ghost of whiteness, the narrative of proper or improper Americanness, or the specter of the “American god,” whose “will” Zimmerman saw himself as carrying out in protecting his neighborhood from the suspicious citizen or the out-of-place, hoodie-wearing “black boy,” to use that loaded phras…
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On Monday we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day and, the next morning, the swearing-in of the first black president of a country that once bought and sold Africans as slaves. The poignancy of this juxtaposition slaps us in the face with our own history. In both sequence and in significance, one day opens the door to the other. The night of November 4 last year, I joined thousands of people celebrating in the streets of Harlem. As news of Barac…
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…that it began or came into flower with the preaching of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other preachers of civil disobedience during the racial justice movements of the 1950s and 1960s. But King’s justice cries were offspring of earlier venerable prophetic Black preaching that found expression in the wake of a failed Reconstruction period, widespread agricultural depression, the rise of Jim Crow laws, and America’s entry into WWI. Did you have a…
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…way of multiplying themselves. It is difficult to imagine a Martin Luther King Jr. or a Howard Thurman arising out of the ranks of the provincial and petty “culture war” black preachers these days, knowing not just the Christian tradition, but understanding Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of satyagraha. I also imagine that, given its obsession with money, pervasive homophobia and patriarchal strongholds, the Black Church will remain stagnant. So don’t…
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…om Columbus to today,” high school students most often chose Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Students chose two freedom fighters who in life had challenged the racial injustice at the heart of American society and who had often been treated as “un-American” for doing so. Now the civil rights movement had come to embody American grit, courage, and resolve, and these two activists could be invoked as the country’s most famous emblems. A More…
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