by Karren D. Todd Special to R3 Today, I logged on to Facebook and received tragic news. The post read that Karyn Washington, founder of For Brown Girls, had died of an apparent suicide. According to the organization’s website, “FBG was created to celebrate the beauty of dark skin while combating colorism and promoting self love.” It goes on to speak of “encouraging those struggling with accepting having a darker skin complexion to love and embrace the skin they are in”... Read more

In the wake of World Vision’s reversal of their short-lived policy to hire employees who are in married gay relationships, many progressives are swearing off evangelicalism. Perhaps the most public of these vows was a piece that Rachel Held Evans wrote for CNN wherein she professes, “I, for one, am tired of arguing. I’m tired of trying to defend evangelicalism when its leaders behave indefensibly.” (In a later post on her blog, she seemed less certain of this decision.) Evans... Read more

The worshippers flock from Miami, Venezuela, Brazil and other far-flung destinations on their pilgrimage into the heartland of the tribal faith. Alexandre Texiera Ramos flew from São Paulo to Lagos, then drove five hours to this dusty, teeming West African town along the banks of a hallowed river. For six days, he embarked on a series of rituals, from herbal baths to drumming ceremonies in forests sacred to this ancient faith of deities and divination. In Cuba and South Florida,... Read more

In the first decade of the seventeenth century in England, with the break with the Roman Catholic Church fully encoded into law and a bevy of scholars working to complete a new translation of the Bible under the sponsorship of the Protestant King James the VI of Scotland, a Lancaster minister, William Harrison, complained that “for one person which we have in the church to hear divine service, sermons and catechism, every piper (there be many in the parish) should... Read more

This weekend on State of Belief, hear about faith-based efforts to stop the bullying of LGBTQ students in schools – and the opposition that claims to stand for religious freedom. Also, settle into your seat and grab your bag of popcorn, because we’re talking about the Bible’s recent “boom” in Hollywood with Bishop Gene Robinson. Finally, we talk with one author about the scary – not to mention sad – parallels between the hysteria of the Salem witch trials and... Read more

Karl Marx’s famous maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, can apply just as well to the history of ideas as to the political sphere. Consider the teapot-tempest over religion and science that has mysteriously broken out in 2014, and has proven so irresistible to the media. We already had this debate, which occupied a great deal of the intellectual life of Western civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was a whole... Read more

On February 15, 2014, while a jury found Michael Dunn guilty of 3 counts of attempted murder, they could not reach a verdict on the murder of Jordan Davis. During the trial, we here at Rhetoric Race and Religion collected editorials and essays associated with the trial. Now we here at Rhetoric Race and Religion thought we would collect some of the editorials and essays responding to the verdict. We ask that if you come across some articles please share them with us on our Facebook page or... Read more

A papyrus fragment of “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” that was dismissed by the Vatican as a “clumsy forgery” has been dated as having originated in Egypt around 700 C.E. In an article published Tuesday in Harvard Theological Review, Karen King provides evidence that “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” (GJW) cannot be a modern forgery. The significance of GJW stems from the fact that it appears to be a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples about the role of women in the church. “The dialogue concerns family... Read more

There are the well-meaning ladies who ask you about your husband and children and, when you say you don’t have any, suddenly run out of things to say to you. There are the women’s Bible studies scheduled on weekday mornings, because aren’t all church women married homemakers? There are the sermons and activities directed exclusively at families. There are the pastors who fault the single men for not getting married, even if they’ve tried, and who seem to think that... Read more

I am supposed to be reading about Constantine and his relationship to the bishops in the 4th century. H. A. Drake turns the discussion away from merely looking at Constantine and his actions, and whether or not he was genuine or not, you know the old Constantine scholarly debates. Instead, he looks at the Bishops and their role in the emerging form of Christianity, and their complicity in shaping a coercive Christianity. This is so important. For me, the issue of... Read more