When I announced at the start of this year that I've decided no longer to maintain Bilgrimage, I also noted that if readers have something they'd like me to consider for posting here down the road, I'll gladly do that. Ruth Krall has kindly offered the following essay for publication here, and I'm delighted to share it.
As readers may have divined, I've been slowly winding Bilgrimage down, and with the new year, will likely not be posting any longer. I'm making this decision largely because I find my energy waning after I turned 70 this past March. Ages are only points on a graph, but even so, I do find my energy decreasing now that I'm a senior citizen — along with my ability to focus.
The photo is by Hans Vivek, who has generously made it available for online sharing at Unsplash.
Well, at least the US Catholic bishops are no longer babbling on about and pretending that all are welcome.
If Robert P. Jones is correct when he writes that white Christianity has served throughout American history as "the central source of moral legitimacy for a society explicitly built to value the lives of white people over Black people," then white American Christians would appear to have a massive educational challenge confronting them. White US Christians would seem urgently to need educational resources permitting them to begin to understand and come to terms with their cultural effect as a major sustainer of white supremacy. Jones makes the claim I've just cited in his new book White Too Long, where he writes,
