Interview

Flamy Grant called in to her morning interview after participating in a day-long silent retreat. Well, not a silent retreat exactly — it was a vocal rest.

After spending the last year touring the U.S. off the success of her album, Grant, who prefers to use her stage name in interviews, needed to rest her voice. Since her rise to Christian music stardom — or infamy, depending on how one feels about a drag queen topping the Christian charts — she has performed in bars, clubs, and churches spreading the good news in glitter.

I was listening to BBC’s Focus on Africa this summer when I first heard Dausab interviewed about his role in the landmark court case to overturn Namibia’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. In a throw-away line, the host indicated that Dausab was a Christian — and Dausab didn’t equivocate.

“As a born-again Christian, I always go back to Jesus …,” Dausab told the host.

Who was this born-again Christian that brought down Namibia’s sodomy laws? I wanted to meet this guy.

Travel back in time with me to the early 2000s: Celebrities were openly fat-shamed in tabloids, and supermarkets were overrun by all things “low” — low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, low-sodium, or low-sugar. Diets like Atkins, paleo, keto, raw foods, and juice cleanses abounded. TV shows like “The Biggest Loser” and “My 600-lb Life” were used to paint fat people as lazy, undisciplined, and disgusting.

It goes without saying that we’ve got plenty of dread to spare this year. Since President Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, former President Donald Trump and his allies have falsely claimed that the election was rigged. Millions of Americans agree. Meanwhile, many other Americans fear how far Trump could take his authoritarian impulses in a second term. As our political culture becomes more tightly wound, the nuts and bolts of our democracy seem to be coming loose. For the average citizen, it can be hard to verify every claim we see circulated in partisan media or online. Despite election law being clear that a party can choose its nominee at convention, for example, many Republicans claimed it was “too late” for Biden to step down from his reelection campaign.

“To me being Christian means f---ing s--- up,” Layshia Clarendon told ESPN’s Katie Barnes. “That’s what Jesus came to do. It means disrupting and fighting for the most marginalized people.” During the 2020 WNBA season, they helped lead players in protesting police violence against Breonna Taylor and other Black women. Clarendon helped launch the WNBA’s Social Justice Council, alongside players like Sydney Colson, Breanna Stewart, Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, A’ja Wilson, and Satou Sabally. Clarendon signed on to the Athletes for Ceasefire in Gaza, and they launched a foundation to provide grants that help transgender people access health care and other services.

As I remember it, I was first introduced to Jamie Grace’s career while listening to a Christian radio show in 2011. At the time, she was a 19-year-old college student majoring in child and youth development, recently signed to a major Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) label, and was less than a year away from being nominated for the 2012 Grammy Award for Contemporary Christian Music Song. She was a Black woman in an industry largely made up of white men; she was open about her diagnoses of Tourette syndrome, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder at a time when I wasn’t aware of many people who were; and she was a very skilled guitar player, songwriter, and singer. As such, it seemed obvious that she had a bright future in an industry that needed new energy.

Over nearly three decades, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — a self-described “preacher, author, and community builder” — has often played Baruch to Rev. William J. Barber II’s Jeremiah. Through efforts like the Moral Mondays movement and the Poor People’s Campaign, the pair has worked to articulate what they describe as a “Third Reconstruction,” reflected in an agenda that unites the nation’s poor to confront “the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation.”

"A lot of psychologists, sociologists, and theologians talk about the fact that forgiveness is really for the forgiver and not the person being forgiven. But that’s not true in a lot of our American narratives [where] forgiveness is actually for the person who did the wrong, so they can be “healed.” We’ve lost the victims in that conversation."

Last week, the University of Michigan announced that it would begin selling alcohol at its football games.

For decades, alcohol sales had been largely limited at college football events, but in 2019 the Southeastern Conference began allowing its schools to sell alcohol at games. Now, more than 80 percent of the top football schools sell alcohol on game day.

In the U.S. church, opinions on alcohol seem more polarized than politics. On the one hand, many conservative and fundamentalist faith traditions treat all alcohol consumption as a sin, some going so far as to suggest that Jesus turned water into nonalcoholic wine. On the other, progressive and moderate faith traditions incorporate alcohol into church with events like beer-and-hymns, theology-on-tap, and “pub churches.”