Editor’s Note: This article contains a full and graphic description of the indecent at hand. Reader discretion is advised. A spitty situation As much as some churchgoers may like to attend a congregation with a well-known preacher, they probably don’t want him to end up in a story on TMZ. For members of Transformation Church […]
Author: Jemar Tisby
In junior high and high school whenever the teacher would assign a group project, typically only a couple of people in the group really did the work. The rest of the group found ways to extricate themselves from actually contributing to the project and simply celebrated when a good grade came back. Now that Juneteenth […]
We knew that this would happen. It was unlikely that 17 Republican Senators would join with Democrats to convict Trump during his second impeachment. But when the verdict came in on Saturday, February 13, 2021–just over a month after a violent insurrection at the Capitol in support of the former president–it was still infuriating.
We have the distinct privilege of running an excerpt from Jemar Tisby’s latest book, How to Fight Racism. We hope that you enjoy it and that you will purchase a copy at www.HowToFightRacism.com. Jemar is the founder of The Witness BCC and CEO of The Witness Inc.
Southern Baptist leaders have chosen to prop up whiteness.
It is ironic that in their statement, these Southern Baptist seminary presidents claim they are “standing against the tide of theological compromise.”
There is no form of theological compromise that is more American than vigorously opposing those who advocate for racial justice while remaining silent about the racism and whiteness running rampant in the church.
Preliminary demographic data about the 2020 electorate has started rolling in. The Associated Press published the VoteCast survey that revealed some disappointing, if not altogether surprising, information: 81%…again. Four years ago eighty-one percent of voters who identified as white and evangelical threw their support behind Donald. J. Trump. Now, in a reprise of 2016 presidential election, white […]
Basketball legend Kobe Bryant unexpectedly died in a helicopter crash on Sunday, January 26. Bryant’s 13-year old daughter Gianna, John Altobelli, 56, his daughter Alyssa Altobelli and wife Keri Altobelli along with Christina Mauser, Sarah Chester, her daughter Peyton, and the pilot Ara Zobayan, also perished in the crash. The news struck like a power […]
Black Christians don’t have to leave part of ourselves at the door in an attempt to placate the least culturally-aware white person around us.
Christians, of all people, should care about words. Our entire faith is communicated through and founded on them. The first verses of the first book of the Bible communicate the power of words. How did God create the heavens and the earth? The Lord spoke. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was […]
Can the written word change the world? If you need an apologetic in the affirmative, then look no further than the first National Antiracist Book Festival. Under the leadership of national book award-winner, Ibram X. Kendi and his capable staff at the Antiracist Research and Policy institute, this event gathered nearly 50 authors and publishing […]
After Trump took office, white evangelicals approved of how he handled the job of president at a rate of 78 percent.
Is racism mostly a reality of the past? Has America largely overcome its fixation with skin color? Have we become post-racial? The signs of progress inundate our society. We have seen black people and other people of color enter all segments of life from blockbuster movies, to the Supreme Court, to billionaire-level wealth. It appears […]
I remember two married couples from my church—one couple was black and the other was white—who became friends. They had very different views on politics, vastly difference experiences in life, but they bonded over conversations about their children. One day the black couple told the white couple about “the talk.” No. Not the “birds and […]
While activists have initiated remarkable progress when it comes to race in America, the struggle for black freedom continues. The reality is that racism remains. It is sometimes hidden in the walls and rafters of the nation’s institutions but even so, like an un-killable cockroach, racism still frequently scurries back into the light. No matter […]
Announcing The Witness 2019 National Conference: Continuing the 400 Year Journey of Joy and Justice October 31st. Reformation Day. Five hundred years ago a German monk named Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the church doors at Wittenberg and helped spark the Protestant Reformation. Through a bewildering amount of twists, turns, schisms, fractures, and revivals […]
In 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt officially designated “Columbus Day” as a federal holiday. It commemorates the 1492 arrival of Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, in the Americas. The colonial and imperialist elements of Columbus’ voyage, however, have made the holiday perennially controversial. Columbus and the Europeans who followed him brought diseases that ravaged the existing population, […]
A recent statement entitled “The Gospel and Social Justice” has deservedly garnered much attention and opposition. For those who found the new statement wanting, then another declaration on Christians and justice, written forty-five years ago, may offer a better perspective. In November 1973, a group of evangelicals gathered in Chicago to compose a documenting asserting […]
This article was first published on the Soujourners Magazine website. Click here for the original and more content! American has a crisis of mass incarceration, and it has little to do with crime rates. The system is broken: America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Even though the United States […]
“Changed laws do not change hearts” is a persistent sentiment in today’s evangelical culture.
America fought its bloodiest war mainly over the issue of slavery. It took the deaths of over half a million citizens to abolish the heinous institution. This figure does not account for the untold numbers of black lives devastated by slavery—brutal corporal punishments, the centuries of strenuous physical labor without remuneration, and, significantly for this […]