Frederick Buechner The world’s terrible fragility Much of the rest of the day I lay there on my back watching the endless TV replays of the unspeakably beautiful September morning with the plane, golden in the…
Parker Palmer An ancient fear of “the other” Human nature includes an ancient fear of “the other.” In the face of diversity, we feel tension - and that, in turn, can lead to discomfort, distrust, conflict, violence, and…
Leigh Finke How Do I Learn The Language? Non-LGBTQ+ people may get anxious hearing - let alone being expected to use - language they don’t understand or simply aren’t used to. At this point, you might be flipping…
Kerry Connelly The Birth of the White Empire Most of us - especially those of us who like to think of ourselves as good - sort of cringe at the idea of a white empire. It reeks of…
Maya Angelou Morocco Although I was living in the twentieth century, I still held on to the nineteenth-century fanciful idea of Arabia. There were Caliphs and strong sexless eunuchs and harems where…
Brian McLaren For them, the conceptual side of faith simply isn’t that important Some people don’t think much about their faith. For them, it’s primarily a matter of belonging (I enjoy being part of a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or dharma group) or…
Susan K. Smith Both the church and the state, when it came to racism, were weak from the start. As slavery continued to thrive in the United States, slave traders, many of whom called themselves Christian, participated in the business of selling human beings. As the economy of the…
Catherine Meeks Opposing racism needs to be rooted in the vision of God’s dream The Christian faith is based upon being committed to God’s dream for us personally and communally. Our living creatively into the future involves our devotion to the compelling vision of…
Ibram X. Kendi The cycle hardened the racist ideas inside me Like the famous question about the chicken and the egg, the answer is less important than the cycle it describes. Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves,…
Robert P. Jones Underneath the glossy, self-congratulatory histories This book puts forward a simple proposition: it is time - indeed, well beyond time - for white Christians in the United States to reckon with the racism of our…
