Read more

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich once said, “Well behaved women rarely make history.[1]” Harriett Tubman, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Wright Edelman, Hillary Clinton; these women all have a mark in history because they refused to bow down to conventional standards of the world and decided instead to stand up for what they believed to be right. Across time women have made their indelible mark in social change; they have stood, or in some cases sat down for “the cause.” Their contributions... Read more

by Andre E. JohnsonR3 Editor *Read part 1 here. Get your copy of the Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition American Prophetic Tradition in paperback One issue that had Turner’s full attention during the period of Reconstruction was the passage of the 1875 Civil Rights bill. The bill explicitly banned discrimination from public places and was one of the last major reforms of the Congress during Reconstruction. Drawing on his relationships with Senators and members of Congress fostered during his time... Read more

For the past two years I have been working on an book project that in some respects is a significant departure from my previous scholarship. At the same time, it is a natural extension of the work that I have been long doing. The project in question is a work of constructive Muslim theology. I began to seriously consider writing a work of theology — and not simply a study of theology — two years ago after a number of... Read more

I once wrote that the black church was dead. It was a deliberate provocation. I wanted to spark a conversation about the role of black churches in light of contemporary challenges, particularly the crisis of American capitalism.Inequality is deepening in our country. People are working harder for less, and unemployment is high. Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” confirmed what we already felt, that we have entered a second Gilded Age in which the divide between the wealthiest and the rest... Read more

For white people living in the United States, the entanglement of Christianity with chattel slavery and antiblack racism forms a set of deep and confusing paradoxes. As a nation, we understand ourselves in terms of freedom, but we have been unable to grapple with our depriving blacks of freedom in the name of white prosperity and with our tolerance of legalized racial segregation and discrimination. As a nation, we have been shaped by racism, habituated to its presence, indifferent to... Read more

On New Year’s Day 1965, hundreds of gay San Franciscans arrived at 625 Polk Street in the city’s Tenderloin district for a much-anticipated “Mardi Gras Ball.” The event organized by gay rights — or, to use the then-common term, homophile — activists was not unlike the thousands of public parties being held this June during Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month: There were drinks and music, hand-holding, flirtatious glances and kisses between friends old and new. But it was... Read more

African American playwright, actor, television producer and filmmaker Tyler Perry is an American cultural phenomenon. Perry has made over half a billion dollars through the development of films, plays, and television series that center storylines about black women, black communities and black religion. The success of a Tyler Perry Production, coupled with Perry’s participation in a range of media and in multiple roles as creator and actor, position him as a significant site of black religious and cultural expression, and... Read more

One of the greatest heartbreaks in my life occurred after coming out at the age of 24: I lost my Muslim community. After my public coming out, via an article inThe Los Angeles Times, and the backlash that came with it, I retreated. I distanced myself from the people I cared about, the people I’d been raised with in the masjidin Los Angeles, those whom I viewed as extended members of my own family. I was certain that they had stopped... Read more

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate from South Africa, called one of his books “God is Not a Christian.” He might have added a subtitle, “God is not a man, either!” One of the great problems in our world is patriarchy. The late James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, put best in song, “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.” Patriarchy assumes that men are made to lead and women are simply cooperative and reproductive subordinates. These assumptions come... Read more