By Robert Gudmestad — Millions of people voted in an online poll in 2015 to have the face of Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill. But many might not have known the…
By Robert Gudmestad — Millions of people voted in an online poll in 2015 to have the face of Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill. But many might not have known the…
By Egan Millard, Episcopal News Service — At its annual convention on Nov. 8 and 9, the Diocese of New York established a task force to examine how it can make meaningful reparations for its participation in the slave trade and committed $1.1 million from its endowment to fund the efforts the task force recommends. It also passed four resolutions condemning slavery, which had first been introduced by John Clarkson Jay – grandson of…
By R. Drew Smith Professor, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Co-Convener, Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race With 2019 regarded by many as marking 400 years since the beginnings of African enslavement…
By Sikivu Hutchinson, The Humanist — On the bustling streets of Kensington in London last week, one of the Black women I asked to comment on the recent election of…
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 Wyatt Massey, Frederick News Post — The Rev. Dr. Ernest Campbell said no, James Forman could not speak at his church service the next day. Campbell was the senior pastor at Riverside Church, a predominantly white church on the west side of Manhattan. Forman, a black civil rights leader, wanted to read something to the congregation at the next day’s service on May 4, 1969, according to a history…
A House vote on bigotry underscored powerful changes in the party’s coalition, including among young Muslims. By Emma Green, The Atlantic — The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to condemn anti-Semitism, along with a litany of bigotries against Muslims, immigrants, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, LGBT people, and members of other religious minorities. The resolution followed a week of drama in the Democratic Party, with members clashing over…
Though opposition to abortion is what many think fueled the powerful conservative white evangelical right, 81 percent of whom voted for Donald Trump, it was really school integration, according to Randall Balmer, chairman of the religion department. By Margery Eagan, The Boston Globe — Here are some facts that might surprise you. In 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the biggest white evangelical group in America, the…
RECORDED 1/21/19 — Dr. Ron Daniels (President, IBW21) talks with callers and guest Rev. Dennis Dillon (Senior Pastor, The Rise Church, Brooklyn NY) about Dr. Martin Luther King, King’s vision, Economic Justice, the African Diaspora and the Year of the Return to Africa on this Martin Luther King Day edition of Vantage Point Radio.
By Felice León, The Root — It’s no secret that Jesus Christ, known in Christian circles as the Son of God, is often depicted as a white man. But, how…
By Marisa Iati, The Washington Post — More than two decades after the Southern Baptist Convention — the country’s second-largest faith group — apologized to African Americans for its active defense of slavery in the 1800s, its flagship seminary on Wednesday released a stark report further delineating its ties to institutionalized racism. The year-long study by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary found that all four founding faculty members owned slaves…