The Little Friar

By now, nearly everyone is aware of the horrible violence perpetrated against the congregation at Emanuel AME Church in historic Charleston, South Carolina.  I've seen a few responses to this evil on Facebook that bear some push-back. 1.  This was not an act of " senseless violence ".  Calling the violence "senseless" implies that the shooter has no moral agency.  What occurred on Wednesday night was not "senseless violence" -- it was a cold, calculated, act of racial hatred.  (While I love Anderson Cooper and watch his news program nearly every day, he's really dropped the ball here.) 2.  Some have suggested that the shooter "obviously" suffers from some " mental illness ".  Thing is, mental illness doesn't make us kill one another .  Mental illness demands to be treated with compassion.  When we call this event "senseless violence" or attribute some "mental illness" to the shooter, we blur the ...

Over the past weeks and months, I've heard a tiresome response from certain brothers and sisters, used when I highlight the American sin of racism, and how that sin is destroying fellow children of God, those made in God's image in Christ:  "More Black Americans kill one another than White Americans who kill Black.  So, surely violence isn't racist". So, repeat after me:   Racism  is institutionalized White-on-Black violence, even if that violence is internalized by Blacks.  In 1619, the first twenty Africans were brought over as labor for the new colonies.  Within one generation the white majority had defined black people as permanent slaves and non-human property.  This created a social order in which black people were only valuable for their ability to support a white dominated society that was economically prospering off of the stolen land of Native Americans and the stolen labor of African Americans.  Consequently, a system of White-on-Black ...

I've been following  the stories and images coming out of Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown's death. I've blogged about it three times already.  And I've lost more than one friend over what I've said.  So this event -- nearly more than any event in recent American history -- has a complex of emotions for me.   I'd love to ignore Ferguson.   Have my posts helped anything?  I honestly don't know.  Will this blog ever make a difference?  I doubt it, but I'm hopeful.   I'm glad I've written those things.  To express solidarity.  To hold the mirror up to our society, in an attempt to name our sin and hasten reconciliation.   But I struggle with these posts.  With putting things in my Facebook feed about Ferguson.  Why?   To be honest, my motivations are unclear and murky, for starters.  Am I responding out of my own guilt?  Out of decades of racism that has benefitted me, in small and large ways?  A...

On August 11, 1965, nearly 49 years ago to the day that violence and rioting erupted in Ferguson, MO, after the shooting death of Michael Brown, an 18-year old black man headed for college, Dr Martin Luther King heard the news:  Rioting in the Watts neighborhood of LA. Those riots lasted for 6 days, resulted in 34 deaths and over a thousand injured, as well as over $40 million in damages.  The next day, Dr King gave this speech (the emphases are mine): " And so I want to use as a title for my lecture tonight, 'The Other America.'  And I use this title because there are literally two Americas.  Every city in our country has this kind of dualism, this schizophrenia, split at so many parts, and so every city ends up being two cities rather than one.  There are two Americas.    One America is beautiful for situation.  In this America, millions of people have the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality flowing before them.  This America is th...

First, I begin with a quote from Archbishop Oscar Romero: " This is the mission entrusted to the church,     a hard mission: to uproot sins from history, to uproot sins from the political order, to uproot sins from the economy, to uproot sins wherever they are ... No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say: "You have to treat that.     You have to get rid of that.     Believe in Christ.      Be converted." This is my prayer for America.   The past few days have been an exercise in sinful contrasts.   We mourn and burn with a holy outrage over the treatment of Christians in Iraq.  We change our Facebook and Twitter avatars in a show of solidarity of that suffering (I did).  We use the hashtag, #WeAreN, to further call attention to that suffering.  Fewer of us notice that more than Christians suffer at...

We're fast approaching Holy Week -- that culmination of Lent.  There's a lot of talk in Lent about repenting . In Matthew's Greek the word is  metanoeite  (3.2).   The traditional translation is repent .  The GNB paraphrases:  "Turn away from your sins".  Eugene Peterson's translation in  The Message  cuts to the chase:  "Change your life" (today we might say, "Get a life!"). But today I took a step back.  I entered into a conversation with a friend of mine about racism.  I was claiming that we Americans have a 250 year sin which demands confessing.  He said we can't and shouldn't repent of past sin.  That was then.  This is now.  But I think he's wrong.  Racism is  a sin.  It's my sin.  The Greek means, literally, "change your mind" -- and that's where I want to start, with where we are, with the fact that, actually, not only are we not very good at changing our minds, but indeed ch...

Over the past few weeks, Americans have been faced with a dialogue about race yet again.  What's more, we're missing the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which our very real racism is having very real effects on our selves and our culture. And for Christians I blame the sin of self-deception. The Bible clearly warns against self-deception.  Take, for example: The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17.9). The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks and make your home on the heights, you who say to yourself, 'Who can bring me down to the ground?' (Obadiah 1.3). If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself (Galatians 6.3).  In the past, warnings about self-deception were everywhere.  Nowadays, though, it's faded from view -- particularly in our Christian communities. Christians worry about a great many vices but we rarely warn against self-...

I still lament Saturday's verdict. But, even as I lament, I pray for my neighbors. The deceased Trayvon Martin and his family, George Zimmerman and his family, the prosecution, the defense, the judge and jury -- they are all our neighbors.  If we take Jesus seriously .  Those with whom we disagree, get frustrated with, or harbor anger against -- they're still our neighbors. Our enemies, in fact, are our neighbors. This is why Jesus insisted we show mercy toward our neighbors.  No one's excluded. So what am I to do with the anger about the verdict.  Maybe this helps: Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?  Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?  You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.  And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.  You do not have, because you do not ask (James 4.1-2). So what question should we ask? The one th...