Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack. On September 2, 2022, under the bright lights of Arthur Ashe Stadium, Serena Williams lost at the U.S. Open for what is likely the final time. At 40 years old, after only playing in six previous matches the whole year and beating the world No. […]
Good day everyone. There has been a lengthy break in my writing, but now I am back. I pray that you all are in good health and prospering in the ways that are meaningful to you. I must confess that sitting down to write something on Kevin Samuels, particularly after his death, feels strange. I […]
By now, everyone has heard, and seen, the moment forever enshrined in television history as “The slap heard around the world”. Will Smith’s physical response to Chris Rock’s comedic attack on Jada Pinkett Smith was viewed in real-time by millions and rewatched and remixed countless more times. Presently, a version where Mr. Rock sheds gold […]
My good friend Jemar Tisby recently wrote an excellent article for The Witness BCC about the latest controversy to surround Transformation Church in Tulsa, OK and Pastor Mike Todd. In his article, Jemar offers a poignant response to “Spittlegate” and casts vision for the church as it should be. I hope that you will take […]
By now, you’ve probably encountered the infamous video of Pastor Mike Todd of Transformation Church in Tulsa, OK. No, not that one, the other one. No, no, no, even more recent than that. There you go, THAT one. I could sit here and break down bar for bar what made Pastor Todd’s sermon illustration so […]
We are embroiled in one of the most tumultuous periods of our recent collective memory. This is largely due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, which has taken the lives of nearly a million people in the United States. To many, this has simultaneously been a time of national reckoning with another deadly “virus”: systemic racism. The American Medical Association (AMA) has rightly deemed racism “a public health […]
I am not here to debate abortion. In fact, I’m not even going to share my own complex views on this issue because what I think really doesn’t matter. Instead, I’m here to talk about the weaponization of Black women’s bodies in the abortion discussion. The morning after the 2016 election, I sat in my […]
In junior high and high school whenever the teacher would assign a group project, typically only a couple of people in the group really did the work. The rest of the group found ways to extricate themselves from actually contributing to the project and simply celebrated when a good grade came back. Now that Juneteenth […]
This summer, I protested the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor starting and ending at the same place Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated – the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. I had my mask on while we walked around downtown, sometimes kneeling and praying for the lives lost and that […]
Imagine beating a brown-skinned man beyond recognition, hanging the mutilated body from a tree on a Saturday, and then going to church on Sunday to worship Jesus Christ–a man who the Bible says had skin like bronze, was beaten beyond recognition, and then hung from a tree. Lynchings in America were often (and still) conducted […]
We knew that this would happen. It was unlikely that 17 Republican Senators would join with Democrats to convict Trump during his second impeachment. But when the verdict came in on Saturday, February 13, 2021–just over a month after a violent insurrection at the Capitol in support of the former president–it was still infuriating.
Over the past four years, many of us saw the worst side of those we thought we knew well. Relationships went awry, and long-standing friendships were irreparably damaged as America’s political climate revealed old ideologies under a new face: Donald Trump. What we saw throughout the Trump administration shouldn’t be solely attributed to him. Still, […]
History bears witness that white supremacy and Christianity in America are inextricably linked. White supremacy isn’t a fringe idea; it is the status quo. White evangelicals told on themselves because they chose to absolve their own guilt when the moment came to speak. Instead of defending the voiceless and the powerless, they sought to clear their own collective name.
This post originally appeared on Joel’s personal blog and appears here with a few minor edits. You can read the original post here. I know that free speech is patently misunderstood, as illustrated by much of the recent popular discourse on this theme. This piece isn’t a reflection on its legal or constitutional definition, nor […]
If your inbox looked anything like mine in 2020, almost every email you got—save maybe the ones from Target—greeted you with, “I hope this email finds you well in these unprecedented times.” If your church was anything like mine in 2020, many of the prayers your pastor prayed started with something like: “Lord, your people […]
Jemar Tisby and I are sitting in an apartment near Central Park on the Upper West Side. It’s November, the year is 2018, and the air is crisp, if not downright cold. In a couple of months, Tisby’s debut book, The Color of Compromise, will be released. Two years prior to this conversation, Donald Trump […]
Atatiana Koquice Jefferson isn’t a name that will live in infamy. It’s likely that her name won’t end up in any history textbooks. And her name certainly wasn’t in the mouths of the news anchors on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. No. No one seemed to be thinking about Atatiana that day. But I was. More […]
The Jesus signs and Christian imagery carried by the insurrectionists turned many a stomach, but it also does us the favor of further differentiating between Christ’s true disciples and Cultural Christians. The former are pliable clay in the Master’s hands; the latter are silly putty in the hands of corrupt leaders.
Black un-dignity is a gift from God because it’s a stumbling block to the indignity of racism. God has given Black people the beauty of our culture for the ashes of oppression.
The white nationalism cloaked in self-righteous Jesus worship absent Christ-likeness has been enthroned as the state religion in America yet corrupting many expressions of Christianity beyond her shores and is such a telling indictment. So many of the Christian voices I’d come to love and respect have become loudly complicit in this dangerous religious circus and Jesus cult that many are growing increasingly despondent of.
