This past weekend a couple of folks called my attention to tweets from Joash Thomas. According to his Twitter bio, he is the National Director of Mobilization & Advocacy for the International Justice Mission (IJM) of Canada. I have great...
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Teaching Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
This is a revised and updated version of a post originally published on March 6, 2020: After a couple weeks focusing on “creation” in my Created Called for Community (CCC) course at Messiah University, we have shifted gears slightly to focus on the...
Martin Luther King Jr’s Christian nationalism
This is a piece I wrote in 2011 when I was doing a column at Patheos: When we think of the defenders of a Christian America today, the Christian Right immediately comes to mind. We think of people like Glenn...
Friday night court evangelical roundup
What have Trump’s evangelicals been saying since yesterday’s update? Eric Metaxas is still attacking systemic racism. Today one his guests said, “systemic racism does not exist. It is a conspiracy theory that the radical Left has been using to try to destroy the...
Teaching MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
After a couple weeks focusing on “creation” in my Created Called for Community (CCC) course at Messiah College, we have shifted gears slightly to focus on the meaning of “community.” Our first reading on this front was Martin Luther King...
Alan Jacobs: Most Evangelicals “are simply not *formed* by Christian teaching…”
Alan Jacobs on Jeff Sessions‘s use of Romans 13: The lesson to be drawn here is this: the great majority of Christians in America who call themselves evangelical are simply not formed by Christian teaching or the Christian scriptures. They are, rather, formed by the media they...
Someone Give the Governor of Alabama a History Lesson
We need historians more than ever. Yesterday Kay Ivey, the Republican governor of Alabama, released this campaign ad: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMWXeIlq_Ic&w=560&h=315] Ivey says “we can’t change or erase our history.” She is correct. But just because a particular community has a...
Read It Again
King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail...
Martin Luther King's Christian America
This post draws heavily from a column I wrote for Patheos in March 2011 and my Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction: When we think of the defenders of a Christian America today, the Christian Right immediately...
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Was Rejected by the “New York Times”
It is a staple reading in most United States history survey courses. At Messiah College, first-year students read it as part of a required course called “Created and Called for Community.” But did you know that the original “Letter from...