Articles

Topics of racism and justice are some of the most difficult to discuss for Americans.  One way to start a discussion is to use a dialogic method of discussion.  Such a method asks small groups to agree to speak and to listen on a topic following a certain order that encourages time for silence between […]

[1] I want to begin with a difficult and inexplicable truth: white racism is alive and well in the institutional and cultural life of the United States of America. Since the death of George Floyd, there have been multiple calls for racial reckoning in the United States and around the globe. [1] These calls reveal […]

[1] In this essay I want to ask how a person who identifies as white and Christian might live in the United States amidst the ongoing legacies of slavery.[i] There are countless other questions before us—questions about the shape of Black lives, not least!—and I do not want to pretend that the questions of this […]

[1] Our personal security is more of a fantasy than we can comfortably admit, and appeals to national security can conceal the darkest chambers of social bigotry. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt eighty years ago on February 19, 1942, devastated the lives of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent (Nikkei) […]

[1] As a pastor in the LCA ordained in 1981 now serving in the ELCA, I experienced the embodied pastoral ethics of Vison and Expectations as being too weighted in scope and emphasis on sexual ethics so that all other ethical considerations were overwhelmed.  Today, with the demise of Vision and Expectations, there remains a […]

[1] When I was growing up, I remember hearing the theme song to the popular American television show Cheers proclaim: “Making your way in the world today takes everything you got.” For many people across the world, in wildly different contexts, that sentence rings profoundly, and sadly, true. Humans endure unsustainably long workdays at a […]

[1] Social media platforms have fast become essential, embedded institutions. By the term “social media” I’m referring to web-based platforms that host individuals and communities, these include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, WeChat, WhatsApp, MeWe, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Meetup, Medium, Quora, and Twitch. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2005, 5% of […]

[1] In this season of Epiphany, North Americans experience the continued darkness of winter but can see the faint glimmer of light on the Eastern sky a little earlier each morning.  This winter, we are all trying to mitigate the forces that keep us separated from each other: the highly transmissible Omicron variant of Covid-19 […]

[1] In 1989, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon published Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, arguing that the end of Christendom in the West arrived in Greenville, South Carolina, the night the Fox Theatre opened on a Sunday evening. “The Fox Theatre went head to head with the church over who would provide the […]

[1] Don’t Look Up, a much-discussed movie that came out on Netflix in December 2021, posits a comet heading towards the Earth that will wipe out life on the planet. The comet is intended to represent the coming catastrophe of climate change, and the movie satirizes the denialism, greed, and disinterest paralyzing the discussion and […]