Valuable Recent Commentary about Link Between White Supremacy and White Christianity in the U.S.

I'm sorry to have been away for so long. As I noted in a posting some weeks back, we have been dealing with health challenges, and we're hoping that a surgical procedure today will put them behind us. 

News Commentary in Time of Plague: 43 Pages of Obituaries in Houston Today (and the Role Many US Christians Are Playing in the Pandemic)

OUR LOCAL PAPER: The Houston Chronicle
obituary section was 43 pages today.

Let that sink in.

— Rogelio Garcia Lawyer (@LawyerRogelio) July 13, 2020

(P.S. As Newsweek reports, this is a standalone section of obituaries for the year up to now. Read the Newsweek report, and you'll see a lot of commenters on social media are stating that it's likely a high percentage of those deaths are Covid deaths.)

"Public Health Train Wreck in Slow Motion" in US: Where's the Leadership? Where Are the Pro-Life White Christians Who Set This in Motion?

Teresa Hanafin in today's "Fast Forward" from Boston Globe: 

[A]s Dr. David Blumenthal, president of The Commonwealth Fund, put it, the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is like watching a "public health train wreck in slow motion." And the Choo-Choo-in-Chief is at the controls, either completely befuddled or completely callous. Take your pick.

Reaping the Whirlwind: America Now Confronts the Reality of Its 2016 Election

People Can Only Bear So Much Injustice Before Lashing Out via @thenation https://t.co/qevqJ0pvk4

— 𝕎𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕒𝕞 𝔻. 𝕃𝕚𝕟𝕕𝕤𝕖𝕪 🌈 (@wdlindsy) May 30, 2020

Jack Holmes, "This CNN Crew's Arrest in Minneapolis Is More Than a Mistake":

Imagine what they're capable of when they're not live on national television. 

Wendell Griffen: "Chickens of Racism, Materialism and Militarism Have Come Home to Roost in the Convergence of Trump’s Presidency and the COVID-19 Pandemic"

 I'd like to point readers to a valuable essay my friend Wendell Griffen published two days ago in Baptist News Global. It's entitled "Our national curse: the cruel convergence of Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic." Wendell does an impressive job of connecting the dots to show that "the chickens of racism, materialism and militarism have come home to roost in the convergence of Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic." He writes:

Rev. Wendell Griffen on Our Choice for This Season of Pandemic

And for a different (and in my view, authentically pro-life) voice from an Arkansas church, after I just shared dismal news about a church in Arkansas in a previous posting, I want to share this recent sermon from my friend Pastor Wendell Griffen of New Millennium Baptist church in Little Rock. New Millennium stopped holding services some weeks back, and Wendell is now delivering his sermons online.

Notes on Gerardo Marti's American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency

I recently read Gerardo Marti's American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and would like to share some thoughts about that book with you. A key insight of Marti's book is that, in looking at Donald Trump, we Americans are looking in a mirror and seeing our own faces. It is not, as many in the media have wanted to imagine, a fluke that he seized the White House in 2016, riding significant backlash against the nation's first African-American president to do so. This outcome is consistent with ugly currents long present in American history — from the outset of the nation, in fact — that many Americans appear determined not to see.

"The Immigrant Children…Cannot Be Erased by Shopping Excursions": An Advent Sermon by Wendell Griffen

I'm happy to be able to share with readers a sermon I heard my friend Reverend Wendell Griffen deliver this past Sunday at New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. Wendell has uploaded the sermon to his blog site, and has given me permission to share it here, too. Wendell's sermon, which is entitled “An Advent Prayer for Desperate People,” contextualizes Advent and Christmas in a way that Lisa Koop's Advent sermon, which I shared two days ago, also does. Both note the struggle many of us have in finding spiritual foundations and hope in a world in which much seems deeply awry, in which the powerful abuse the weak, with self-professed Christians standing squarely on the side of the powerful and cheering them on. Wendell's sermon follows.

"You Served Your Tour with Valor": Honoring Veterans of the African-American Struggle for Justice and Dignity

Today is the U.S. Veterans' Day holiday, and as tributes to this or that family member who has been in the military pop up in my social media feed, I'm thinking of a tribute my friend Wendell Griffen posted on his blog a number of days back to an Arkansas civil rights attorney and state representative, John W. Walker. John Walker died 28 October, and Wendell eulogized him at his funeral in Little Rock on 1 November.

Wendell Griffen, "Standing with Elaine"

With the permission of my friend Judge (and Reverend) Wendell Griffen, I'd like to share with you a statement he has made recently on his blog The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope. A bit of background: as Wendell's posting notes, in October 1919, hundreds of black men, women, and children were murdered in an event in eastern Arkansas now known as the Elaine Massacre. There are some outstanding historical accounts of what occurred in this massacre — one of the largest race-based massacres in American history. These accounts provide a narrative of what happened to the extent to which historians can piece together what occurred, when so much evidence has been lost or suppressed.

Two More Resources re: Non-LGBTQ-Affirming Policy of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Shane Claiborne's Refusal, as a "Progressive Evangelical," to Affirm Queer Folks Unambiguously

When a commitment to a doctrine overshadows the ability to see other people’s humanity, one has conceded their own humanity for ideology.

— Broderick Greer (@BroderickGreer) February 11, 2018

 

Two items I'd like to share with you today as a follow-up to yesterday's posting noting what's now happening in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, as the church creates a two-tiered structure for its employees that allows rights and privileges to straight folks denied to queer ones. In addition, my posting yesterday focused on the controversy that has ensued after Shane Claiborne, a "progressive evangelical" who refuses to affirm LGBTQ people unambiguously, announced that he and his Red Letter Christians will be sponsoring a revival of "progressive evangelicals in Lynchburg, Virginia, in April.