Reading Time: 6 minutes It was a complicated Memorial Day weekend in the US, and not just because of the nation’s now-quotidian gun violence, or because the current debt ceiling crisis threatens an already “degraded” US military with further hits to “readiness and morale”. Just prior to the weekend’s events, which honor and mourn people who died in the […]
white supremacy
Posted inWar and Peace
Is America on the precipice of Civil War II?
Reading Time: 5 minutes The American Civil War is still far from over. A powerful metaphor for this worry was the violent insurrection Jan. 6, 2021, at the US Capitol, during which a Confederate battle flag was carried triumphantly, by an aggrieved Southerner, through the hallowed confines of Statuary Hall. Many, if not most, in the Jan. 6 mob […]
Posted inCritical thinking
Weaponized rosaries: Humanist lessons from The Atlantic’s latest misfire
Reading Time: 6 minutes There is a long and storied history of religion being weaponized to spread fear and rally followers into violence. The KKK burned crosses. The Wehrmacht, like preceding German military forces, wore belts with buckles that read “Gott mit uns”, “God with us”. In India today, saffron, a color strongly associated with Hinduism, is used by […]
Posted inRacial justice
Mental illness doesn’t cause mass shootings. Hate armed for war does
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 […]
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 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 inRacial justice
It’s tough to be a white supremacist leader these days
Reading Time: 3 minutes The white supremacist group we’re discussing today, Patriot Front, utilized RocketChat to maintain their secrecy and privacy. It didn’t work.
Posted inUncategorized
The Theological Roots of White Supremacy
Reading Time: 4 minutes There was an interesting piece on Bloomberg the other day with an interview of Robert P. Jones by Francis Wilkinson. The bio and intro reads: Robert P. Jones is founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the new book, “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.” Jones, who […]
Posted inCulture, General
If You Don’t At Least Verbally Disavow Racism We Don’t Know You’re Not Racist
Reading Time: 6 minutes Talk is cheap, but when I only see someone posting that it’s sad about all the property destruction, I get skeptical. Here’s why.
Posted inNews
Op-ed: The greatness of Robert E. Lee viewed through Trump’s eyes
Reading Time: 4 minutes I’ve been thinking today about the question of whether skills in technical or artistic fields somehow cancel out moral crimes, or not so much whether they do as why anyone thinks they do. It came up because on Friday a reporter asked Donald Trump a question about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in […]