politics

White Christians stand out in their negative attitudes about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities

Robert P. Jones / By

To be sure, most white denominations, and most white Christians, have today taken pains to distance themselves from slavery, the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation, and overtly racist attitudes openly espoused in the past. But in survey after survey, white Christians stand out in their negative attitudes about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities …

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Sit, listen, and share

Justin Phillips / By

One such example of choosing who I would dialogue with came from joining a student group devoted to racial reconciliation at Duke Divinity School. That group helped me consider this tension – between my privileges and my interaction with the world – within a trusted community. Each week we gathered to hear one another’s stories. …

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We successfully weathered that storm once, and we can do it again

Robert Putnam / By

Perhaps the single most important lesson we can hope to gain from this analysis is that in the past America has experienced a storm of unbridled individualism in our culture, our communities, our politics, and our economics, and it produced then, as it has today, a national situation that few Americans found appealing. But we …

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If we are to survive and thrive, we must hold its divisions and contradictions with compassion, lest we lose our democracy.

Parker Palmer / By

I discovered a book that helped me understand how heartbreak and depression – two of the most isolating and disabling experiences I know – can expand one’s sense of connectedness and evoke the heart’s capacity to employ tension in the service of life. Lincoln’s Melancholy, by Joshua Shenk, is a probling examination of our sixteenth …

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An increasingly cutthroat social and economic contest

Robert Putnam / By

Some Americans have reacted to these many forms of dislocation by turning on their perceived adversaries in an increasingly cutthroat social and economic contest. Racism and gender discrimination persist and are even intensified. Indeed, the progress toward racial equality achieved in an earlier era has in many ways reversed. White supremacist  violence is on the …

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Identity Politics

Robin DiAngelo / By

The United States was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Yet the nation began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendents. Women were denied the right to vote until 1920, …

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Jesus calls us

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons / By

This book focuses on the type of progressive Christian political engagement championed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others in the public square and outside the walls of the church. Entering the story of progressive Christianity in the United States in the midst of a theological battle might seem like an odd …

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