Watch as R3 Blogger Ebony A. Utley chops it up with Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal, Monica R. Miller, and Emmett G. Price III.   Read more

When Crystal St. Marie Lewis isn’t writing for R3, she’s engaging Christianity’s tough questions on her blog: Diary of a Christian Universagnosticostal. She is known for her candid (and often edgy) postmodern perspectives on theology, faith infused with reason, the future of Christianity, and “radical religious pluralism”. Crystal describes herself as “incurably curious” and says skepticism is a calling, not a curse. She is committed to following Jesus, living her most faithful expression of Micah 6:8, inter-religious dialogue and the seven... Read more

Brian Foulks is a church planter/ lead pastor, an urban missionary, and a social activist. He has a passion for those nestled in the cortex of Hip Hop and church. Known for being an advocate for invading the culture with the truth of the scripture. He is considered to be a hybrid of the faith-connecting the seminary with the block, the unorthodox, hip hop culture with some of the liturgical aesthetics of the church. His mission is based on a... Read more

WHEN African-Americans go to the polls next week, they are likely to support Barack Obama at a level approaching the 95 percent share of the black vote he received in 2008. As well they should, given the symbolic exceptionalism of his presidency and the modern Republican Party’s utter disregard for economic justice, civil rights and the social safety net. But for those who had seen in President Obama’s election the culmination of four centuries of black hopes and aspirations and... Read more

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney traveled through Mississippi earlier this year, he used grits, football and “y’all” to connect with voters, but in the heart of the Bible Belt, many Southerners were more interested in the religious beliefs of the first Mormon candidate for the nation’s highest office. Local missionaries Brandon Urry and Riley Harris, both 20, spend as much as 12 hours a day pounding the pavement, sharing their faith with people who often know little about the... Read more

What’s wrong–and what’s right–with the role of faith in American politics today? This is a big and complex question, and this post is simply an attempt to offer some thoughts. In it I will address two things that I see wrong with the role of faith in American politics today and two critical areas I believe may help improve the relationship between faith and politics. Feel free to share yours as well or to seek to extend what I’ve written... Read more

I couldn’t watch more than about fifteen minutes of the second Presidential debate. Unpleasant emotions flooded me as I watched the verbal jousting between Obama and Romney. Hearing Romney gratuitously praise Big Bird while promising to cut National Public Radio funding was bad enough in the first debate. When I heard Obama promising to go after every energy source and praising “clean coal” I’d had enough. Neither mentioned global warming as a primary concern. I read this week in Scientific... Read more

Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had never attended Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago and had decided to attend services, and proselytize for, a black separatist, nationalist church that refused to allow whites to participate in crucial religious services because white people had been condemned by God for their iniquity in the ancient past and had been for ever marked white so black Americans would know instantly to keep their distance. In fact, the definition of white in this... Read more

Here are the tweets from the Presidential Debate held October 22, 2012. Enjoy [View the story “Rhetoric Race and Religion #R3debate” on Storify] Read more

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States brought questions about race in America to the forefront of political and social discourse in novel ways. It also gave rise to the claim that America had entered a post-racial era. What people mean when they invoke post-racial is often unclear, however. And is achieving a post-racial nation even possible or desirable? Most often, media figures have deployed the term to indicate that Obama the candidate and president... Read more