by Tony PetersonR3 ContributorFirst posted on LifewayI wasn’t aware of Rev. Martin Luther King until he was assassinated on April 4, 1968. I was nine years old. I could tell from the behavior of the adults around me that something horrible had happened. When I asked Dad about it, he said “Dr. King was like the president of the Negro people.” That explanation satisfied my nine-year-old mind. But when I got older, I realized that Dad had highly oversimplified Martin Luther King’s... Read more

On April 9, 1968, Benjamin Elijah Mays had the burdensome honor of delivering a eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr. on the campus of Morehouse College. During that somber moment, the retired college president faced a crowd that stretched as far as the eye could see. They were looking to Mays for words of comfort and inspiration as they tried to comprehend the civil rights leader’s assassination and to summon the courage to continue the struggle. Over the course of... Read more

About a year ago I attended an excellent conference on the great American author, Flannery O’Connor, at Loyola University’s Water Tower Campus. O’Connor is a colossal figure in American letters — not only because of her superior literary craftwork, but because she resides in the Holy of Holies in the hierarchy of writers of Catholic fiction. Moreover, O’Connor always inspires deeper thought about what it means means to be “religious” and “spiritual” in the late modern age, a dichotomy that... Read more

On Monday the United States will celebrate one of its great festivals of civil religion as Barack Obama is inaugurated for a second time. Although nothing in the Constitution mandates it (the only things the Constitution specifies are the date and the wording of the oath), the ceremony will include an invocation, a benediction, undoubtedly one or more mentions of God in the inaugural address, and the words “so help me God” as part of the oath of office. These... Read more

Cynthia R. Nielsen, Ph.D. is a Catherine of Siena Fellow at Villanova University. Nielsen’s work is highly interdisciplinary in nature and her research interests include ethics, social and political philosophy, critical race theory/philosophy of race, and the philosophy and sociology of music. Her forthcoming/recent publications include: Foucault, Douglass, Fanon, and Scotus in Dialogue: On Social Construction and Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan March 2013), “Resistance is Not Futile: Frederick Douglass on Panoptic Plantations and the Un-Making of Docile Bodies and Enslaved Souls,” Philosophy and Literature 35.2... Read more

by Cynthia NielsenR3 ContributorFirst posted at Per Caritatem Taking as his point of departure the story of Rip Van Winkle, who, having slept for twenty years, awakens to a world he hardly recognizes, Martin Luther King Jr. develops the analogy in his speech, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” to speak to contemporary issues of his day—issues still alive and well in our day. The important point about Rip Van Winkle was not that he slept for two decades but that... Read more

As we head into a new year, the guardians of traditional religion are ramping up efforts to keep their flocks—or, in crass economic terms, to retain market share.  Some Christians have turned to soul searching while others have turned to marketing. Last fall, the LDS church spent millions on billboards, bus banners, and Facebook ads touting “I’m a Mormon.”  In Canada, the Catholic Church has launched a “Come Home” marketing campaign.  The Southern Baptists Convention voted to rebrand themselves. A hipster mega-church in Seattle combines... Read more

President Obama will publicly take the oath of office with Bibles once owned by his political heroes, Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One Bible was well read, but cited cautiously. The other granted scriptural sanction to the civil rights movement. When Obama lifts his hand from the Bibles and delivers the inaugural address on Monday, his own approach to Scripture will come into view. Characteristically, it sits somewhere between the former president and famous preacher. His faith... Read more

A recent parliamentary report in the United Kingdom reveals that some Muslim women are removing their headscarves and anglicizing their names to improve their chances in the job market. Two best friends featured in the upcoming documentary film Hip Hop Hijabis did the exact opposite. Born in Bristol to Jamaican parents, they converted to Islam in 2005, started wearing the hijab, and changed their names to Sukina Abdul Noor and Muneera Rashida. Together they are known as the hip hop duo Poetic... Read more

On January 7, 2013, the New York Times carried a story about the race to fill the Congressional seat in Chicago vacated by the resignation (apparently for both health and legal reasons) of Jesse Jackson, Jr. The district is still strongly African-American, though less so than it used to be because of recent remapping. The story described the candidates eagerly seeking the endorsement of black clergy in the area. The candidates are black as well, with one exception: a white woman who had previously... Read more