Willie James Jennings, “After Ferguson: American Must Abandon ‘Sick Christianity’ at Ease With Violence”
Law and order have always been hallowed words on the American landscape filled with two abiding realities: our racial animus and our obsession with property. We repeat the mistake continuously in this country of trying to address our racial animus as though it is a virus that occasionally attacks our social body, rather than seeing that racial animus is a constituting reality of our social body. The ideas of law and order have always encoded the work of white bodies controlling dark bodies for the sake of controlling the land, organizing spaces of commerce, and monitoring the movements of racial others. We live always in the midst of geographic struggles with deep racial underpinnings, where policing presence tasked with controlling space moves unremittingly toward confrontation with black bodies, whether in malls, parks, neighborhoods, or stores.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Remarks on Citigroup and Its Bailout Provision, Dec. 12, 2014
Kathryn Joyce, “Report: Bob Jones University Responded to Rape Victims With Woeful Ignorance of the Law, Often Blaming Victims”
That a fundamentalist institution—one most famous for banning interracial dating up until 14 years ago—has also been cartoonishly terrible at handling rape claims is not much of a surprise. But that Bob Jones University commissioned and, albeit with some serious reluctance, allowed the publication of this damning report is a major new contribution to the current debate on campus rape. …
But the precedent it could set, and the implicit challenge it represents, should go far beyond Christendom. However well BJU lives up to its promises in the months and years to come, the question people should be asking next is: If a school like BJU, with its bred-in-the-bone mistrust of the outside world, will ultimately allow this level of scrutiny, when will we see the same thing from schools that should know better?
Radley Balko, “What Cop T-Shirts Tell Us About Police Culture”
In 1997, police in East Haven, Connecticut, called their own softball team “Boys on the Hood,” a cop-ified take on the 1991 John Singleton film. According to the New York Times, the shirts included an image of “officers pressing the heads of two grimacing gang members onto a car hood.” The shirts became a source of controversy after a white officer with the department shot black motorist Malik Jones four times at close range, killing him. The officer said Jones’ car was rolling backward toward him, and he feared for his life. The department has had a slew of racially-tinged incidents since, most notably in 2009, when a video of police harassment taken by a Hispanic priest was posted online and went viral. Latinos in the area had been reporting frequent incidents of police abuse, and the priest was trying to capture one such incident on camera. Instead, he was arrested. The charges were dropped when his video directly contradicted the officers’ account of the incident. Meanwhile, “Boys on the Hood” continues to be a popular slogan for cop-themed t-shirts.
Addison Hodges Hart, in Strangers and Pilgrims Once More
One way to describe “biblicism,” in contrast to “Bible,” is to say that what the former does, in effect, is flatten all the biblical books. It makes the rough places plain, certainly — just as plain as a checkerboard. But what happens in the process is that the mountains and valleys of the Bible disappear entirely, the variety of its landscapes goes unperceived, and we are left with the wholly mistaken notion that the Bible is a single book by a single author (God), in which every passage is to be received as of equal value and understood literally. In other words, a Biblicist reading of the Bible could conceivably require one to regard, for example, a passage in Leviticus (let’s say one that gives instructions about the high priest’s undergarments) as of equal worth as the Sermon on the Mount. Both are, it is believed, “God’s word,” and therefore must be treated with equal seriousness.
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