Reading Time: 6 minutes First Amendment-loving conservatives have long blamed isolated mental-health issues in very angry individuals but never the availability of guns as the proximate cause of America’s decades-long epidemic of horrific mass shootings in America. Or they claim mass shootings are hardly a problem at all and that, by the way, overall gun violence is supposedly down […]
racism
Posted inCulture
Are we talking about the same America?
Reading Time: 4 minutes When I hear, “Donald Trump doesn’t represent the America I know,” it makes me wonder what America they’re speaking of.
Posted inNews
Former pastor on trial for plotting to exterminate Black South Africans
Reading Time: 5 minutes Knoesen, head of the National Christian Resistance Movement (NCRM)—also known as The Crusaders—is accused of planning to overthrow the South African government. He is on trial for high treason in a case currently taking place in the Mpumalanga High Court. According to the Middelberg Observer, his trial began at the end of April with the submission […]
Posted inRacial justice
Christian school promises ‘swift action’ after racist video goes viral
Reading Time: 3 minutes On Tuesday night, a racist video began making the rounds on Twitter, allegedly featuring members of the baseball team from Grace Christian Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee. It showed a student wearing a KKK hood, sitting on a chair with the “Grace” logo on it. Off-camera, someone shouts, “Who do we hate?” The boy in the […]
Posted inNews
Mississippi governor names April ‘Confederate Heritage Month’
Reading Time: 2 minutes In a decision both shocking and utterly predictable, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves has designated April as Confederate Heritage Month. The legacy of the Confederacy is one of white supremacy, chattel slavery, militarism, and rebellion against the United States government. The Confederacy lost decisively on the battlefield against the Union, but descendants of the Confederates spent […]
Posted inDeep Dive
The meager moral fruits argument
Reading Time: 7 minutes “If this conversion you speak about is truly supernatural, then why is it not more evident in the lives of so many Christians that I know?” A Hindu acquaintance to the late Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias Philosophical arguments can take on several forms: deductive, inductive, and abductive. I am becoming more of a fan of […]
Posted inHealthcare
White supremacy is killing us in many ways, including COVID
Reading Time: 2 minutes If you’ve been paying any attention, you know that white supremacy and related hate groups pose a large problem in the U.S. The Southern Poverty Law Center finds in their 2021 report on extremism that extremism has become embedded in mainstream U.S. politics. And USA Today notes an all-time high in white supremacist propaganda in […]
Posted inNews
New lawsuit alleges South Dakota hotel banned Native Americans
Reading Time: 2 minutes America has a long, ugly history of discrimination and racism. For most of that history, skin color and ethnicity determined how much political and economic access you had. This adversely impacted the standard of living for nonwhite groups, who had less access to capital, education, and resources. After the Civil Rights Movement, broad changes in […]
Posted inHistory
We’ve been here before: 5 centuries of (flawed) human rights advocacy
Reading Time: 5 minutes There’s a quote by 19th-century essayist Charles Dudley Warner that I think about every time I revisit world history. As he wrote, “It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.” Cute, right? But the phenomenon he observed, of thinking ourselves automatically morally […]
Posted inEducation
Banned book lists serve only one purpose: to entrench prejudice and bigotry
Reading Time: 7 minutes Last year Texas lawmaker, Matt Krause got himself noticed by creating a list of 850 books he deemed unsuitable for young readers. The Krause list of “unsuitable material”—including Class Act (2020) by award-winning writer and illustrator Jerry Craft—was distributed to a large number of schools libraries in the state. As a consequence, one school district […]