For every season, there is a message. “Do not be afraid.” “Let my people go.” “Take up your cross.” “I have a dream.” In America today, I’ve come to believe, God’s Word for us is, “Go to hell.” Unbeknownst to most Americans, our justice system changed radically in the late 20th century. Like most countries in the modern West, roughly one in a thousand Americans were in prison in the early 70s. Today, we incarcerate 1 in 107 Americans. Over... Read more
On June 2, 1964, while hundreds of Freedom Summer volunteers were still finishing their training in Oxford, Ohio, three civil rights workers went missing in Neshoba County, Miss. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary Bob Moses was charged with leading the project that would organize poor, black Mississippians to challenge the power structure of the South and upset the Democratic National Convention. Moses knew from his experience in Mississippi that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who had left... Read more
Dear faithful, biblical sisters and brothers who are trying to follow Jesus in this time called America, I write to you during a summer of Supreme Court decisions and annual church meetings when religious news has, once again, become focused on sexuality and contraception (and whether your state legislature or employer should have a say in these matters). As these are deeply personal matters, I understand that people care about them. As they have to do with life and love... Read more
When he was four score and seven years removed from the independence that America celebrates today, President Abraham Lincoln surveyed the landscape of both a battlefield and a nation at war and declared in words that we’ve not been able to forget that it was time for a “new birth of freedom.” 150 years later, our wars are scattered all about the globe, but the US seems every bit as fractured as it was in Lincoln’s day. Yet, we have... Read more
Fifty years ago this summer, as the Civil Rights Bill was signed by President Johnson and hundreds of students worked to organize voters through Freedom Summer in Mississippi, Bob Zellner worked as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Criss-crossing the South, going to jail, surviving beatings, and standing down George Wallace, Bob learned how freedom is a constant struggle. Five decades later, he’s still at it, teaching a new generation to trust the gospel of sister and... Read more
1) If corporations get a religious accommodation to deny contraception to their employees, can employees get a religious exception from the taxes withheld to finance unjust wars? 2) Given that a corporation’s by-laws do not outline its religious commitment, how is a court to know when a request for accommodation is based on true conviction? 3) A conscientious objector must substantiate her claim with documentation of conviction at a time prior to the occasion when said conviction would seem convenient.... Read more
Since Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow in 2010, communities of color across America have been talking about the need to dismantle America’s system of mass incarceration. As with the old Jim Crow, the problem is institutionalized racism (not just “a few bad apples,” but a system that corrupts the best of people). The language of “law and order” many have replaced “segregation forever,” but the result is the same: black men are subject to a system of control... Read more
Ten years ago this month, Rutba House hosted a gathering of intentional Christian communities, scholars, and church leaders to talk about what we saw happening in the world around us and how we sensed the Spirit calling us to respond. In truth, we were a young, upstart community trying to find our way in a tradition that had inspired us, though we didn’t know it well. Thankfully, some elders with real wisdom came to share freely what they’d heard and... Read more
Christian’s around the world are celebrating Pentecost today, the birthday of the Church when the Spirit fell like fire on Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem, helping them to both speak and understand new things. Daily, Acts tells us, new people were being added to their number. When the leaders of that early Christian movement were locked up for saying what they had heard and seen, they reported to the authorities, “We are witnesses… and so is the Holy Spirit whom God... Read more
By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II Today I am in Goldsboro, NC, witnessing the graduation of my son and preparing to eulogize a nine-year-old daughter of our community. Dr Maya Angelou’s life and poetry often represented this kind of duality that we all exist in—the place between joy and sorrow, peace and pain, tears and smiles. And so today we, the North Carolina NAACP and the Forward Together Moral Movement, join so many in grieving the loss and celebrating... Read more
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
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