Top Five Posts: Faith, Forgiveness, and Rachel

Last updated on: July 6, 2015 at 12:57 pm by Andre E. Johnson

Top Five Posts: Faith, Forgiveness, and Rachel 2015-07-06T12:57:27-05:00 Andre E. Johnson

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Here are the top posts for the week of June 29-July 5, 2015 on the Rhetoric Race and Religion Blog. We ask that you share this with others.

1. The Argument *Against* the Multicultural Church

by Katelin Hansen

If churches do enter into a journey of multicultural worship, it is essential that safe refuge be available for congregants of color. This is also why it is important that when such endeavors are undertaken, they not ultimately be headed by white pastors and leaders (and they so often are). It’s why we must hedge toward the marginalized culture in planning worship services and events, rather than compromising squarely in the middle. Because there is no ‘happy medium’ when one group is so disproportionately abused.

2. #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches

by Andre E. Johnson

Nine Black life forces extinguished. In a church. By a self-confessed white supremacist. That is a terrorist attack. Some entity has decided this tragedy was their cue to continue terror attacks through fire…a method of terror used against Blacks by fire-branding slave catchers, pattyrollers, the Klan…burning crosses…dynamite sticks…burning churches. But there is nothing to see here folks. Just a small case of prolonged PTSD-triggering domestic terrorism in a so-called Christian nation. Move along.

3. Faith and Forgiveness: Obama’s Political Theology

by Christophe Ringer

Lost on Graham was Obama’s articulation of grace that refused to let America as a political community off the hook for this act of racial violence. Obama squarely invoked the history of racial violence, racial subjugation, systemic oppression, voting rights, unjust public school systems, unconscious racial bias, and collective salvation. More importantly, he argued that we don’t need “more talk.” Far too often in the face of racial violence and unrest we retreat from messiness of public life in order to have more “conversations around the kitchen table.”

4. A Social Death By Misadventure: Rachel Dolezal and the Manipulation of Blackness (Part 1)

by Gee Joyner

The problem I have with Rachel Dolezal is her manipulative use of the agency of “passing” when it is profitable, convenient, and comfortable. Identifying and experiencing American Blackness are fruits from a different bowl. Her faux complaints of racial harassment and discrimination aside, I would like for her to be Black when it’s condemned not when it’s cool. Yes, she attended Washington D.C.’s Howard University (a prominent black college) and married and divorced a Black man, and had Black adopted siblings, and has served as the Alaska-Oregon chapter President of the NAACP, serves as an adjunct instructor in Africana Studies at one of Washington state’s colleges, and wore braids and curls and got an orange tan, yet all of the aforementioned things do not make her Black.

5. Keeping Faith in a Season of Change

by Matt Matthews

But there’s a second possibility that involves seeing Post-Constantinian America as an opportunity to retrieve and recover a more authentic Christianity. This choice will be awkward and difficult at times, and we will surely look clumsy as we practice our way into it. It is the way of kenosis, of a self-emptying of one’s own power and privilege to make room for the other. At times it may feel like we are losing our lives when in fact we are really only losing that old, false life mortified in our baptism. As a baptized people, we will discover that power is not “power over” others but the empowerment of others. We will discover renewed authenticity when we realize that a great deal of the hate directed outward toward others is really a manifestation of the discomfort, fear, and hate we actually feel toward ourselves but are too dishonest and spiritually ill-equipped to confront directly.

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Charleston and the Role of the #BlackChurch

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