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Bernice King, daughter of MLK, is an assistant pastor at New Birth.
If there is anyone who values free speech, it is a tenured professor!
God ain't good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us.
I went to Catholic school and experienced racism firsthand from nuns and priests.
Black women care deeply about civic engagement, democracy, education, children, and justice.
If there is anything that has broken the church's relationship with families, it is the global sexual abuse scandal.
If you're a black woman at an Ivy League school, there is no free speech for me because they're already pissed that I'm there.
While Chris Martin has a deep interest in yoga spirituality, it does not make him an expert on how best to portray Desi heritage.
What often happens in a court of law is that, if victims do get their day in court, they are on trial as much as the perpetrators.
The usual Republican suspects lined up to side with Trump, chastizing Pope Francis for insinuating that the candidate isn't Christian.
Despite a rich history of black Americans involved in the Catholic Church, invisibility is a big problem for black Catholics in America.
The Charleston shooting is a result of an ingrained culture of racism and a history of terrorism in America. It should be covered as such.
'Hymn for the Weekend' mixes cultural and religious practices, commodifying them into a banal but beautiful message of imagined solidarity.
My memories of Vatican II center on white parishioners turning away from me when I went to shake their hands at Mass during the sign of peace.
Judges can bring their own biases about sexuality in the courtroom, causing victims untold pain in the telling and retailing of their stories.
Whether Trump knew it or not, his strong language tapped into evangelical beliefs about the 'last days' and America's role in biblical prophecy.
Forgiveness is a spiritual practice and biblical mandate from the New Testament that many American Christians engage in as a part of their faith.
Gentrification is stripping people not only of their homes but also of their dignity and their lives, and it is effectively whitening public spaces.
The moment of true capitulation came when the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association quietly took Mormonism off the list of apostate religious groups.
Trump, despite his shallow depth of biblical knowledge, plays into both the apocalyptic end-time fears of evangelicals and their nostalgia for a 'small town' America.
The conversation of cultural appropriation versus appreciation is especially important for the NFL as it seeks to expand its fan base to London and all over the world.
The prosperity gospel and its purveyors are worldwide and account for the rapid growth of Pentecostalism, the global religious movement prosperity preachers come from.
For black Catholics, the papal visit is a time of anticipation but also a time of reflection on their difficult - but important - place within the Catholic Church in America.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen are mirrors of each other. Both enjoy enormous support among evangelicals, yet they lack a command of biblical scripture. Both are among the 1 percent.
Rightwing organizations like Turning Point USA or Leadership Institute spend considerable amounts of money and time to train students with conservative values how to 'fight back.'
Many Catholic parishes were segregated prior to the Civil Rights movement, and the first large contingent of African-American Catholic priests would enter into the seminary in the 1920s.
'Amoris Latetia' reiterates that Pope Francis is interested in changing both the tone and reception of people and families in the church to a more hospitable, less judgmental environment.
Pope Francis is calling for a better way to hold together complicated family lives in the midst of official church teaching without alienating people who have marital issues and family problems.
The pope's instruction for priests to forgive may mean, in some cases, the difference between a woman staying in the Catholic Church or leaving for a more understanding and empowering church nearby.
Voting for Trump will either hasten the return of Jesus, according to evangelical belief, or to allow evangelicals to regain political power in the White House. Either way, it is a win-win situation.
One of the first books that outlined spiritual mapping was 'Breaking Strongholds in Your City: How to Use Spiritual Mapping to Make your Prayers More Strategic, Effective and Targeted,' published in 1993.
The 'teavangelicals' of the 21st century have flipped the script, turning their ideas about Christianity, social responsibility, and care for the downtrodden into a mythology of Christian founding fathers.
Incidents of racial bias and implicit bias happen to African-Americans of every social class daily in America. White people seldom notice or dwell on these as they encounter the quotidian events of their day.
Graham's legacy is not as a maverick or a trailblazer. It is the legacy of a man who used Jesus as a tool to placate the masses so that the status quo of conservative white America could remain firmly in place.
The American Catholic Church made statements on racism as far back as the 1940s and '50s. 'Colored' Catholic girls could not live in the dorms at Catholic University - the bishops' university - up into the 1940s.
There are many photos of Catholic priests and nuns marching in the Civil Rights movement, most notably at the March on Selma, Ala. in 1965. However, the history of Catholicism in this country tells a different story.
Graham may have wanted integration, but instead, he promoted gradualism and provided absolution for racists hiding behind a Christianity attuned not only to Jesus but also focused on regulating behavior and black bodies.
The survivors of Hurricane Harvey do not need empty tweets and platitudes from people like Donald Trump and Joel Osteen. They have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as we say in Texas, they are all hat and no cattle.
As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain't my god.
Issues like immigration, police brutality, and other onerous laws put in place by local and state governments are prime avenues for active clergy to work with their parishioners on the issues that affect their daily lives.
The Chicago Declaration on Women in the Catholic Church, drafted in July of 2015 by Catholics for Choice, stated that it imagined a church where 'women are respected for their choices about their health, welfare, and lives.'
Coldplay's 'Hymn for the Weekend' video featuring Beyonce is already caught in a heated conversation about cultural appreciation of Indian religion and culture versus cultural appropriation of that culture for the western gaze.
In a world where families are drowning on beaches to escape war, leaving the church because of sexual abuse, or denied access because of sexual orientation, the utopia that Pope Francis desires may be impossible for the church to attain.
While the 1963 Birmingham church bombing is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings in the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11, 2001.
The decision to allow clergy to perform same-sex marriages at the discretion of the congregation poses challenges for seminaries training new pastors who come from denominations fundamentally opposed on biblical grounds to same-sex marriage.
Trump, despite his divorces and 'worldly lifestyle', appeals to evangelicals because he is wealthy, powerful, and pays them lip service. They support him because they are tired of losing the culture wars and are addicted to the perks of power.
Our founding documents didn't just protect the right to bear arms: they were designed to protect all the principles upon which America was founded - and the first among those were freedom of worship, peaceful assembly, and the right to free speech.
Trump has benefitted indirectly from a strong belief of evangelicals that the two terms of Barack Obama has led the country to the brink of destruction. Obama was bad enough in their eyes; having the Clintons back in the White House would be the end.
What is the role of a public intellectual in the age of Twitter and soundbites? Is it to share your thoughts for the public good, or is it to curate the heaps of hate emails, tweets, and right-wing articles that trash your intellectual and social work?
C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran professor of church growth at Fuller. He was considered to be the heir of McGavran, founder of the church growth movement. That movement essentially said, 'Whatever grows a church is good' and needs to be nurtured.