Category Archives: antiracism

I Like Listening to James Cone

I just began reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone and I am instantly amazed by the comprehensive description of the pervasive and pernicious power of the lynching tree in American History. I love Cone’s lyricism, and his love for the blues as a means of painting that terrible picture — howContinue reading “I Like Listening to James Cone”

How Will We Love Through the Election?

“Unreliable Allies” Karl Barth, a German Theologian who helped organize the Confessing Church in opposition to the Nazi regime, once said that the church ought to be an “unreliable ally” to any and every political system. That is to say that our primary allegiance to Jesus and his kingdom will often come into tension withContinue reading “How Will We Love Through the Election?”

Tear/Tear, Seem/Seam, Knew/New

On shrinking cloth The heat of a warm water washing or heated tumble dry or, in the image of today’s poem, a flap out on the sunny line, the stretched out fibers of an unshrunken cloth relax. The individual patch of cloth becomes stronger. The individual fibers become relaxed in the heat. That sounds niceContinue reading “Tear/Tear, Seem/Seam, Knew/New”

Don’t Forget, Jesus is the Lord of History

Is the Church Just Following Culture? Try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves from the influences that have shaped us personally and the greater forces that have shaped our context. Our ongoing, and longstanding dialogue about antiracism in Circle of Hope has been dialed up in recent months in the wake of police killingsContinue reading “Don’t Forget, Jesus is the Lord of History”

Hey (!), White People (!), We Get to Repent!

What an extraordinary moment in American History! A bunch of my friends are getting the day off for Juneteenth. There’s talk of making it a national holiday and I don’t think that sounds far-fetched.  Confederate monuments are coming down. Christopher Columbus statues are coming down. It seems like the last vestiges of racism in AmericaContinue reading “Hey (!), White People (!), We Get to Repent!”