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We’ve been saying “White Lives Matter” ever since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, says a Baptist pastor in Dallas. It’s past time for white Christians to acknowledge the ongoing sin of racism, confess our own biases, and seek to create new patterns of thought and behavior.
Ann Atwater was a community organizer and activist in Durham, North Carolina, for more than four decades. Photo by D.L. Anderson
Ann Atwater was a working-class black woman who in the 1970s partnered with a KKK leader to integrate schools in Durham, North Carolina. She was also a community leader who taught others how to build beloved community, writes the New Monastic author.
Christians need to adopt a deeper, more complex understanding of how race shapes our lives and communities, says the author and theologian in this interview. And to resist racism, we need to ‘recover’ Jesus, taking Christ and Scripture seriously.
Reconciliation doesn’t begin with us but with God and God’s longing to reconcile all of us to himself. And Jesus is the model for how reconciliation happens, a scholar says in this interview.
The church has long neglected the third aspect of the Trinity, reducing it to a philosophical concept. But the Spirit is concrete and tangible, and recovering it is critical to the pursuit of reconciliation and social justice, the theologian says in this interview.
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A white youth pastor says it’s important to go beyond diversity when leading youth in the work of racial repair. Admitting failure, fostering careful listening, and paying attention to the local context are all important parts of the process, he writes.
Photo by Leroy Burnell / The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier
A year after the mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church, the congregation is healing from its own unique and often overlooked loss. And the hand of God is moving still, says a pastor assigned to the church after the shooting.
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Differentiating our observations from evaluations can help us recognize the fallibility of our own interpretive powers and acknowledge the racism in our own hearts and minds, writes the associate dean of diversity and cultural competency at Western Theological Seminary.
The Rev. Starsky Wilson, center, wearing stole, links arms with scholar and activist Cornel West as they participate in a direct action at the Thomas Eagleton Federal Court Building in downtown St. Louis on Aug. 10, 2015. Photo by Wiley Price/The St. Louis American
Part of the difficult witness for the privileged within the church is to renounce a bit of that privilege and work on behalf of the marginalized, says the co-chair of the Ferguson Commission.
Photo courtesy of Duke Youth Academy
Jesus interrupts violence with peace, and hate with love. The director of Duke Youth Academy says she has been called into the work of interruption, leading conversations with young white people about race, police brutality and injustice.