How I came to write about white Christians and our dysfunctional discipleship.
We're less than a month away from the May 19th release of my book and I'd like to tell you about the circumstances that led me to this project in the first...
Whose liberation?
This week saw a weird development in our collective stay-at-home reality. The president, encouraged I assume by conservative media, has begun calling for...
Acts of God and Schemes of Men
Our family moved to the South Side of Chicago in the fall of 2009. During the previous year I'd driven Maggie to a train station twenty minutes from our...
Accepting the Unacceptable
Earlier this week I joined a conference call for the purpose of holding vigil and praying for a man who was lying, near death, in an ICU in the Chicago...
No, the virus isn't Chinese. Yes, the president is still a racist.
Well friends, this has been the longest gap between newsletters since I began this haphazard endeavor a few months ago. Distracting times, eh? I trust the...
Letting (white people) go
Earlier this week, in a multi-ethnic social media group that I'm a part of, a pastor posted a question that will resonate with some of this newsletter's...
"White Christians learned to separate their personal ethics from their social ethics."
In her important book, I Bring the Voices of My People, Dr. Chanequa Walker Barnes asks, "How could White people consider themselves Christian while engaging...
Getting practical about solidarity
InterVarsity Press rejected my first proposal of the book that would become Redisciling the White Church. But, graciously, they gave me a couple of...
Racializing Revelation's Vision of Reconciliation
Earlier this week my friend Skye Jethani tweeted the following thread. In his usual thoughtful way, Skye asks some important questions about how those of us...
"...the Bible was used to rationalize racial hierarchy and segregation."
In 2001 I was a graduate student at Wheaton College taking an undergraduate-level theology class which was a prerequisite for my program. Dr. Vincent Bacote...
Preaching grace and justice (at the same time) to whole people
This week a few video clips from some amazing preachers made their way across my social media feeds. The first was from Rev. William Barber of the Poor...
Preaching While White on MLK Sunday
A few years ago a friend invited me to preach at his mostly white suburban church the Sunday before MLK Day. I happened to have a couple of friends who...
Scapegoating the Racists
My family moved to southern California the summer before my freshmen year of high school. That was the summer the Lakers lost to the Bulls in the NBA Finals....
Five Favorite Books from 2019
For the previous few years it's been my habit to compile an almost-entirely arbitrary list of five of the books I most enjoyed during that year. I posted the...
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Remembering a [Christian] Woman We Should Have Never Forgotten
I recently reviewed a new book about Ida B. Wells for The Englewood Review of Books. The book, Passionate for Justice: Remembering a Woman We Should Have...
Will there be racists in heaven?
A few weeks ago a friend retweeted a well-known bishop who is vocal in his opposition to racism who had declared something along the lines of: I'd rather not...
Trying to Remember
Yesterday morning I walked three quarters of a mile from my in-law's home in Brownsville, TN to this roadside marker beside a small family cemetery. James...
Just how much racism is in our DNA?
This week I learned that there's something called the World Socialist Website and that they published an interesting interview with James McPherson who's...
"All of these fanatics were white."
There was one place I wanted to visit during our recent 48 hours in Paris. Well, there were a bunch of places I hoped to visit, but there was one place in...
Experiencing racism is harder than, you know, talking about it.
A quick request: If you appreciate this newsletter would you please share it with a few friends? Thanks! A couple of days ago I spent an hour with about...
