News & Ideas

Wednesday's News & Ideas - 6/17/2020

  • Religious leaders & protest
  • Secret church services
  • Pandemic widens inequity
  • Giglio calls slavery ‘blessing’
  • First Black chair in SBEC
  • The Trayvon generation

Black religious leaders are up front and central in US protests -- as they have been for the last 200 years
The Conversation: That people of the cloth are at the forefront of the current protests over police brutality should not be a surprise.

‘Enter through the back door’: Secret church services in Mexico and Brazil defy Covid-19 rules
The Guardian: Thousands of worshippers sneak in to invitation-only assemblies organized like illegal dance parties, despite rising death tolls

Higher education and work amid crisis
Inside Higher Ed: The pandemic has accelerated and worsened equity gaps in higher education and its connection to work, according to new data, which may also show paths to improving this connection.

Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio sets off firestorm by calling slavery a ‘blessing’ to whites*
Washington Post: At Passion City Church in Atlanta, Giglio described slavery as a blessing after talking about “the blessing” of the cross on which Jesus died.

Rev. Rolland Slade, first black chair of Southern Baptist Executive Committee, elected
Religion News Service: The Rev. Rolland Slade has been elected as the first African American chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, the group that runs the business of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination outside its annual meetings.

The Spark

The Trayvon generation
The kids got shot and the grownups got shot, Elizabeth Alexander writes* for The New Yorker. (trigger warning: racial violence)

*access is limited for nonsubscribers

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