Search for "Martin Luther King Jr."

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

…consciences objectors and civil rights activists. He helped Martin Luther King, Jr. make the argument against Vietnam, drafting King’s “Beyond Vietnam”speech in 1967, broadening the concern of the movement and alienating some moderate civil rights supporters. Author of numerous works on American-American religious history, including There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding t…

Because We Dared to Exist: After Generations of Trauma Black Gun Ownership is on the Rise

By Josiah Daniels

…up in an interracial Christian household where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the fourth person of the Trinity. My family sainted him not just because he fought for the opportunity for families like ours to exist, but because he fought for (racial) justice in a nonviolent way that we believed to be synonymous with Jesus’s methods. But a moment from my childhood that has stayed with me is when my mom taught me about Nat Turner’s rebellion…

Will Millennials Forge a Future for the Progressive Black Church?

By Joshua L. Lazard

…moment as well. A cursory glance at the published sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. would show that, on Sunday mornings, the focus was on a moral and ethical reimaging of the social and political systems of the day. But his speeches at rallies and essays written for publication were much more inclined to draw a bead on the actors in the stage-play of American racism. Because King was a black preacher from the South, the “preaching” moment as it i…

An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

By Rev. Osagyefo Sekou

…h Holy Ghost fire—we would retire to your offices where pictures of Martin Luther King adorned the walls. I so wanted to be like you. Courtesy flickr user Elvert Barnes via Creative Commons The winds of history and happenstance have carried me around the world. From the West Coast, I witnessed an unflinching youth-led resistance in the face of state terror. After spending the summer struggling to write a book about Dr. King and his relevance to th…

Worried About Inequality After the Pandemic? Start By Listening to the Women Ringing the Alarm for Decades

By Liz Theoharis

In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began to organize the Poor People’s Campaign, pulling together poor people and moral leaders from across the country to unite across lines of division. Just two months before his assassination he traveled to Chicago to enlist the women of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which included in its ranks 10,000 dues-paying, welfare-receiving members in over 100 chapters. At the meeting, welfare rights…

From Bad to Worstest: How Liberals Should (And Should Not) Talk About Values

By Daniel Schultz

…day, we must all strive to live up to the ideals of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr….” Yes, I said it. Don’t invoke King if you want to start a conversation on values. Citing King’s authority is overdone, he’s impossible to condense appropriately, he’s not the inspirational figure he used to be. To put that last point differently, nobody who would oppose liberal values will suddenly be converted by hearing Dr. King’s name. Which is of course not wh…

Unreleased Religious Freedom Manifesto Isn’t the Culture War Compromise It Hopes to Be

By Frederick Clarkson

…ements for social justice, preeminently the work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the Civil Rights Movement to which they were integral.” Set aside for a moment the troubling attempt to suggest an equivalency between the right to discriminate on the basis of religious belief and those who challenged and disobeyed the law in service of justice for a population that had been (and continues to be) legally and syst…

Can a Morehouse College Man be Openly Gay?

By Rev. Irene Monroe

…ugusta, Ga., Morehouse’s most famous alumnus is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who graduated in 1948 with a BA in sociology. But King had his own problems with gay men. Sadly, Bayard Rustin, the gay man who was chief organizer and strategist for the 1963 March on Washington that further catapulted King onto the world stage, was not the beneficiary of King’s dream. In a spring 1987 interview with “Open Hands,” a resource for ministries affirm…

Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…mself as a “victim of Church history classes that start in 1517,” the year Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses. That is, until he took a course entitled “Foundations of Judeo-Christian Thought” at TKC. It “raised certain questions within me,” he says of the course. White cites Boston College philosophy professor and TKC visiting faculty member Peter Kreeft’s Catholic Christianity as a factor in his conversion, but he also points to a numbe…

The Rise of the Catholic Cyber-Bullies

By Patricia Miller

…most prominently by the Theological College at Catholic University, where Martin wasn’t even talking about the “gay book” but receptionists were treated to people calling in screaming. Such witch hunts against even a crack of progressive sunlight being allowed to stir the dusty orthodoxy of the church aren’t anything new, of course. When some 100 Catholic nuns, priests and theologians signed on to a statement saying that abortion wasn’t wrong in…