In moments when I want to feel safe, there are no other safer words than “My thoughts and prayers are with you (and your family, friends, city, etc.).” I’ve said them to families when a loved one lies at the cusp of death; I’ve offered them without thought or follow through when tragedy strikes people close to me. It’s what I do when I feel helpless to do anything. It’s not that I intend malice with those words — I just want to get on with the life in front of me, and if you and your trauma and pain occupy too much space, that might cause me to change.
It’s been one year since nine black parishioners were gunned down in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, murders that then-21-year-old Dylann Roof — who is white — is accused of committing. Last July, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a 33-count indictment against Roof that charged him with federal hate crimes for the June 17 attack, alleging that he sought to ignite racial tensions across the United States with the massacre. Friends of Roof have said that he wanted to start a race war. His trial is set for Nov. 7; prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
In some ways, the film is a retread of familiar territory. The rehabilitation center, which doubles as an aquarium, feels like an expanded take on the first film’s fish tank scenario, and employs similar characters and situations. Composer Thomas Newman also returns for a new approach to Nemo’s gorgeous score, with less memorable results.
But thematically, Dory is just as strong as its predecessor. By taking a closer look at its title character’s positive attitude, director and co-writer Andrew Stanton shows audiences that Dory isn’t simply optimistic, but hopeful and resourceful.
The Senate’s plans to debate a spending bill for the Justice Department went out the window June 15, as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) took the floor, beginning what turned into a 15-hour filibuster.
Murphy launched the talk-a-thon to protest the Senate’s lack of movement on legislation to curb gun violence.
Christian communities get romanticized as places populated with ideal human beings who reflect a pursuit of individual morality in a community of righteous individuals. Yet, in a society organized by race, ideal humanity is always white. Race has calibrated dominant streams of Christianity according to the goals of white supremacy rather than allowing the gospel to calibrate human social interaction toward justice. Christianity scrubbed of justice turned Jesus into a white man, and the gospel into a message of individual morality, calibrated to the language of virtue derived from Jesus as a fetish of idealized white masculinity.
The idea that you're "the other" means that you often are treated differently, often treated as less deserving, or less worthy of respect and protection — both from your surrounding community and often from the law. I've seen the "othering" of not only Asian Americans but also of Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, Muslims, and countless others. The political construct of race, and — in an international context “othering” — serves and protects those attributed in-group status. It allows the in-group to keep those deemed “outsiders” at a safe distance to lessen the threat presented by their presence — threat to internal value, threat to safety, and threat to resource access.
In recent years, Southern Baptists have made racial reconciliation a top priority.
This week, delegates (called “messengers”) to the SBC’s annual meeting in St. Louis overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging Christians to “discontinue the display of the Confederate battle flag.”
Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the Charleston massacre — a moment that shocked the nation into considering our collective complicity in a culture of white supremacy and its continuing violence against people of color. The anniversary stands in the wake of another massacre, this time in Orlando, this time targeting the LGBTQ community. For people of faith in particular, this is a moment to consider our complicity in a culture that otherizes a whole swath of our society. It’s appropriate that we apply some theology to these tragedies.
Southern Baptists are usually the first to defend religious freedom. But when it comes to Muslims, some want to draw a line.
At their annual meeting in St. Louis, an Arkansas pastor said Baptists shouldn’t support the right of Muslims to build mosques, especially “when these people threaten our very way of existence as Christians and Americans.”
Something incredible happened there after the murders. Family members publicly forgave the killer. People filled the church the following Sunday — some sitting on the very spot where blood had to be cleaned from the floor – and proclaimed their commitment to compassion and forgiveness.
And the next Wednesday night, they did what they’d always done on Wednesday night. They held a Bible study. They welcomed anyone who was interested, and sat together in the same room where nine people had died and committed themselves to the Spirit of radical welcome. The topic of discussion that day: the power of love.