Here’s an axiomatic truth: If you want to make sure people see or hear something, ban people from seeing or hearing something. That predates the internet, as any former teenager who ever hid under the covers listening to “Louie Louie” with the volume down can surely attest. We are talking about a long time ago […]

There will be few tears for Aaron Persky. California voters gave the Superior Court judge his walking papers last week. Persky, the state’s first judge to be recalled since 1932, became a target of national fury two years ago when he sentenced Brock Turner, a Stanford University student convicted of sexually assaulting a young woman […]

Black lives don’t matter. It is a message that has, for centuries, been woven like thread into the fabric of this nation. It was there when the Supreme Court said black people had no rights white people were bound to respect, there when Nazi POWs were seated at a Southern diner while black soldiers were […]

It made my mother scream. That’s what I remember. I had been lying dozy in bed, but at the sound of her, I scrambled into the living room. She was standing before the television watching an image of chaos in a hotel ballroom. Although I grew up in the 1960s, very few of the signal […]

Today, we will discuss one of the most pressing threats to American Christianity. Meaning, of course, American Christians. Yes, that’s an overly broad statement. All those Christians whose faith requires them to live the Good News, to feed the hungry, to house the homeless, speak for the voiceless and welcome the stranger, surely do not […]

Fair warning: this story will disgust you. But this week — Saturday, to be exact — marks 100 years since a singular act of barbarism in tiny Valdosta, Ga. And the tale of what happened there demands to be recalled. It began when somebody killed Hampton Smith, a white plantation owner. Suspicion fell on Sidney […]

It’s like listening to a song you used to know. It’s an old sweet song, a hymn of hope and possibility. It’s a tune you haven’t heard in far too long. That’s how it is when Rev. Dr. William Barber speaks morality. It’s not just that Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C., […]