Search for "Martin Luther King Jr."

What is Juneteenth to America? It Has to Be More Than ‘Black 4th of July’ if It’s to Be Truly Meaningful

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…th America’s racist past and present posing the question Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so presciently asked in 1967, “Where Do We Go from Here?” We’ve been here before, from Reconstruction to the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s the struggle to form a more perfect union has been continually been rejected in favor of new intransigent forms of anti-black racism. However, with each return to this very spot a portion of the nation’s soul is…

“Ex-Gay” Gospel Star Donnie McClurkin and the Decline of Public Theology

By Joshua L. Lazard

…eople who felt Mclurkin’s “ex-gay” rhetoric was not in keeping with Martin Luther King’s legacy. While even within King’s family there’s a split on the issue of LGBT justice (Coretta Scott King is famously supportive, her daughter Bernice, famously not) an association has clearly been forged between LGBT push for equality to the civil rights movement. With the likes of Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson aligning their activism to include their le…

From Empire to Shire: Rod Dreher’s Nostalgia for Middle-Earth

By Gustavo Maya

…views is subject to doubt. As the debate from Constantine to Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrates, God’s will for creation is often hard to discern. We see “through a glass darkly” and “know in part” as it were. We might think we know God’s will but are later surprised to discover that we were wrong. Christians holding something like Dreher’s metaphysical, anthropological, and moral views argued in favor of empire, slavery, and white supremacy. Th…

Resurrecting Marley at 70: Rastafari History in 5 Songs

By Darren J. N. Middleton

…ack History Month on the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. More than just a Southern or American hero, King has, since that famous march in 1965, become a global icon. Born one year later in Nottingham, England and raised among many black British of African-Caribbean descent, I knew his story well. And yet, in England as in much of the world, MLK stood among an international array of black activists who were championed fo…

Civil Rights and Soul: Memphis 2010

By Lauri Lebo

…et a man, a sanitation worker, who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike. Elmore Nickelberry, who at 79 is still making the nightly sanitation runs, driving a garbage truck through the city. I tagged along on one of his runs, watching him as he swung easily from the truck’s cab, heaving the plastic cans off the curb and dumping their contents into the crusher. Nickelberry remembers the job cond…

In Trump’s America, a Reminder of Our Prophetic Past

By Peter Laarman

…hel, A.J. Muste, Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer. I’m sorry to say that the chapter on Dr. King is something of a throwaway; it may be the case that Raboteau feels that King’s exceptionally strong theological and spiritual rooting in the Bible’s revolutionary counterscript has been sufficiently explored by others. Robateau was shrewd to place his portrait of Heschel up front, as his remarka…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…bodies. But the clarion prophet’s voice best exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., is fading fast. It also bears noting that Black Pentecostalism (the still-growing part of the Black Church) is relatively less interested in structural social change than the African-American Baptist and Methodist traditions. Hispanic evangelicals? See Pentecostalism (above). Self-help, yes; structural social change (apart from reforming immigration policy), not s…

The Myth of “King David” Petraeus and Iraq

By Ira Chernus

…e run afoul of the other problem with the word. If I say that the biblical King David, or the testimony of “King David” Petraeus before Congress, is largely myth, most people think I mean it is a fiction, an out-and-out falsehood. So I have to introduce them to that staple of Religious Studies 101: A myth is not a lie. It’s a story people tell to express their deepest values and broadest understandings of reality. It may incorporate some indetermi…

Peter King, Visit My Class

By Hussein Rashid

…lation between civic engagement and mosque attendance. In other words, the more Muslims are engaged with their prayer spaces, the better citizens they are. The data come from 2008, long before the Park51 controversy or the Peter King hearings. So, Rep. King, any time you actually want to learn something about Islam, I suggest you take a local class, and I’d welcome you. You may also want to brush up on basic concepts like evidence before making an…

On Gaffney’s Radio Show, Rep. King Suggests Muslims Aren’t American

By Sarah Posner

…can Muslims aren’t “American” when it comes to war. “[W]hen a war begins,” King said, every ethnic and religious group unites as “Americans.” “But in this case,” King continued, referring to Muslims, “this is not the situation. … Whether it’s cultural tradition, whatever, the fact is the Muslim community does not cooperate anywhere near to the extent that it should.” As I reported last week, Gaffney has disgusted some conservatives with his anti-M…