Recently Victoria Osteen, wife of pastor Joel Osteen, made some comments that concerned many Christians. Apparently, she stated that worship was not for God but for the worshiper, that when people obey God, they should do it for themselves (although she later revised some of these comments). For many evangelicals, the Osteens are on the periphery of Christianity. They represent the “prosperity gospel”—a message that claims that God will bless the faithful with financial gain. Prosperity preachers often live extravagant... Read more

General Theological Seminary’s campus in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan is everything you’d want in an urban seminary. Handsome buildings, a chapel at the center, quiet walkways in a noisy city, calm places to read and pray. All serving a wonderfully diverse student body eager to minister in a changing world. It’s like the best of historic church properties: harking back to a day of noble architecture and tradition and yet looking outward to a frenetic city and changing religious... Read more

We live in the age of prosperity preachers: Joel Osteen, Paula White, T.D. Jakes. These well known pastors, along with others, have helped usher an age in the Church where teachings of wealth-building reign supreme. Before I go into why this branch of theology robs congregants of benefits from the institution, it’s best that I provide definitions of what exactly the “prosperity gospel” is. In an article for BeliefNet, Scot McKnight is frank with his explanation of prosperity teachings. He... Read more

The Religious Right has failed, and now they’re panicking. They’ve been this way for quite some time, but I think we’re about to enter a new era of desperation as they attempt to plug the holes in their boat and keep it from sinking. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any fresh and inspiring ideas produced from that camp in a long time (something I’m completely open to; I don’t care where a good idea comes from) and I’m not confident they’ll... Read more

I am a Christian and a black man. My wife and I wife attend a majority white church in central New Jersey. We are not an anomaly. The few majority-white churches I’ve visited over the past several years had significant sprinkles of black folks in their pews. Our faith has served an important personal, communal and spiritual role in our lives. It is a source of strength, comfort and guidance, especially in times of hopelessness. My new church has been... Read more

The great irony of our time is that in the age of Obama the grand Black prophetic tradition is weak and feeble. Obama’s Black face of the American empire has made it more difficult for Black courageous and radical voices to bring critique to bear on the U.S. empire. On the empirical or lived level of Black experience, Black people have suffered more in this age than in the recent past. Empirical indices of infant mortality rates, mass incarceration rates,... Read more

If you’re someone that is outspoken on the issue of race chances are, at one point or another, you’ve had a conversation with a so-called “pacifist” who has cited MLK as a pacifistic example. They then use MLK’s life as a means in which you need to be exactly like. This quickly turns from a back and forth dialogue to a dead-end conversation. To say that the way in which Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Jesus, or Nelson Mandela are the... Read more

Nadia Bolz-Weber bounds into the University United Methodist Church sanctuary like a superhero from Planet Alternative Christian. Her 6-foot-1 frame is plastered with tattoos, her arms are sculpted by competitive weightlifting and, to show it all off, this pastor is wearing a tight tank top and jeans. Looking out at the hundreds of people crowded into the pews to hear her present the gospel of Jesus Christ, she sees: Dockers and blazers. Sensible shoes. Grandmothers and soccer moms. Nary a... Read more

My department chair warned me against writing the book. He said it would be professional suicide. I was an assistant professor at Columbia University in the mid-1980s, just a couple of years out of graduate school. As I was completing revisions on my dissertation, preparing it for publication, the televangelist scandals broke. It was great fun, I confess. Jim Bakker, founder of the PTL network (for “Praise the Lord” or, as the wags said, “Pass the Loot”), had a sexual... Read more

The blood of Michael Brown has seeded the soil of a great American revolution—sprouting yearlings of new black leadership onto the political and public landscape. The Ferguson Rebellion has exposed deep-seated racism, hyper-militarized state forces, unabashed police brutality and the soul-crushing poverty that will come to define “the Age of Obama.” It also revealed the open hostility between many from a younger generation of activists and elites of the traditional civil rights, religious and civic organizations of the Black freedom... Read more