By R. Drew Smith, RNS — American religion and politics have been stubbornly connected — except where we pretend they aren’t. Despite constitutional separations between church and state, religion has been more closely tied to politics and politics more closely tied to religion than most care to admit. And yet, advocates for international religious freedom often treat religious freedom and political freedom as totally separate and distinct domains. This separation…
By Dr. Keith Magee — America is experiencing the most perilous of times in recent history as the result of its president, Donald Trump. Even though Monday morning he stepped…
By Julianne Malveaux — The US House of Representatives passed the Securing America’s Fair Elections (SAFE) Act in June by a nearly totally partisan vote of 225-184 in late June….
This is Part 1 of a 4 part series on Reparations by Yes! By David Ragland — “If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we…
In theory, a president can offer comfort at times like these. But this one would prefer to hurl insults. By Richard Wolffe, The Guardian — In normal American mass murders – because such horrors have become so astonishingly normal – the president usually plays the role of some great but helpless comfort blanket. He may be unable to break the NRA’s cold, dead grip on the Republican party, but he…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — Dylann S. Roof is an avowed white supremacist. He wantonly, brazenly, and unapologetically slaughtered nine African-Americans in a South Carolina church in 2015. He’s under…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — PART 1. We don’t have to be familiar with Frantz Fanon to concede that social conditions create, shape and even determine social consciousness. Nor do…
By Danyelle Solomon — 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of Africans sold into bondage arriving on Virginia’s shores. It has been 156 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, 55 years since the end of Jim Crow, and 51 years since the civil rights movement. All of these moments in U.S. history represent crossroads—moments where the country made a choice or where people demanded that the words on the pages of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights became more than words; that policies and practices were equitably distributed among all people, not just a select few…
‘The Most Formidable Mind of Our Times.’ By Tayari Jones, Times — I have never been to Lorain, Ohio, but it has been on my bucket list for 20 years…
By Chandra Muzaffar — A number of commentators have linked the killing of 20 people at a Walmart store in El Paso in the United States of America on Saturday…
By Ryan Cooper, The Week — In popular discourse, white nationalists are often portrayed as super-patriots — people who worship America and all it stands for. But the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Take the instance of white nationalist terrorism in El Paso over the weekend. The culprit — following in many footsteps before him — apparently wrote and posted online a screed which fulminated against a “Hispanic…
Liberal policies are incoherent because Democrats have been polluted by these two failed world-views
By Keith A. Spencer, Salon — There are no hippies on Haight Street anymore. Along the eponymous road in the storied San Francisco neighborhood, arguable birthplace of the counterculture movement,…