Sitting in a folding chair next to neat piles of saffron, cumin and sumac, a portly man with an unbuttoned linen shirt looked me over as I lingered to take a photo of his vibrant shop. It was early September and, despite the stagnant heat which trapped an often unpleasant mixture of spices and body odor in alleyways, I was eager to explore Jerusalem’s Old City for the first time. Privy to my excitement and observant of my distinguishing (read:... Read more

In Ferguson, we see a warped curtain of supposed wholeness pulled back, torn in two to reveal a broken community. We see open wounds and revelations of ugly fractures that happened long ago. Fractures that are still happening. In Ferguson, women and men allow the Holy Spirit to drive them into the streets night after night, withstanding rubber bullets and snarling dogs and tear gas. They appear to us now as ragged and exhausted as a man hanging on a... Read more

In the 1940s my white father, who lived in Arkansas, was visiting Michigan for a Methodist conference when he found his assigned roommate was a black man. Outraged, he thought about requesting a different room, asking himself how he could accept and room with a man he perceived as inferior and hang onto his own self-esteem? Despite this inner conflict, he was polite to him and then was surprised to find that he liked the man. At that moment in... Read more

One day in 2009 after President Obama took office, I walked into my Greek exegesis class at Ashland Theological Seminary in Detroit and one of two white male students asked, “Dr. Smith, don’t you think we live in a post-racial society given we have elected a black President and here I am sitting in your class a black female with a Harvard Ph.D.?” I didn’t doubt my student’s sincerity. I’d like to think that he felt safe enough in that... Read more

by Marguerite Spiotta  Special to R3 As a college student at a liberal arts institution, the ways in which my courses interconnect and comingle never cease to amaze me. This semester especially, the subject matter of my four classes interconnect with such ferocity that I wonder if perhaps in the convergence exists absolutely no coincidence at all. In other words, I see God guiding and focusing my course work to reflect something greater and more indicative of the real world... Read more

By Natalie Bullock Brown R3 Contributor A few days ago, I read on The American Conservative website (of all places) an article entitled “Seven Reasons Why Police Brutality is Systemic, NotAnecdotal“. The piece lists seven reasons why police misconduct is systemic, from inadequate training in nonviolent solutions, to the unfair, routine targeting of minorities, particularly African Americans.  I actually found the list during a search I conducted online looking for articles about police brutality.  Of course, Michael Brown’s murder and the... Read more

Natalie Bullock Brown is an award-winning and Emmy nominated producer and consultant, and is chair of and an assistant professor in the Department of Film & Interactive Media at Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Natalie served as co-host for Black Issues Forum, a public affairs program on UNC-TV, the local public television station, for over twelve years. She recently produced a 38 part dvd series documenting the 50th Anniversary Commemorative Conference of Freedom Summer, and also produced a... Read more

Imagine discovering a lost and forgotten ancient Jewish/Christian writing, one not included in the New Testament, that dates to the earliest days of the emergence of Christianity. For historians of early Christianity or ancient Judaism, there is nothing more exciting — think of the amazing significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Nag Hammadi “Gnostic” gospels. That is precisely what we have in the case of the Didache (pronounced “did-a-kay”), an ancient Greek manuscript discovered in 1873 in a... Read more

Asian American woman have lived and suffered in a problematic cycle of racism from the wider community and patriarchy from within the Asian American community. I attended my first Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) Leadership meeting in June 2014 and learned a lot about its history and its organization. Through this meeting, I came to appreciate the long historical development, as well as the goals and achievements of the FSR. During a casual lunch conversation, a few of us were... Read more

THE path from leaving Bibles in naval hotel rooms to placing weapons of mass destruction in the hands of religious zealots might seem rather a long one. But Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force captain who set up the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), argues with passion that both things are undesirable for the same reason, and both need to be opposed in the same spirit. His watchdog and campaign group has set itself the task of challenging a new... Read more