No. 421 July 2014

Why Do Christians Suffer?

 
Suffering
Rather than ask God why He allows suffering in our lives, I’m more curious about why we believe we’ll be exempt from it.

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Venezuela
This sadness is like luggage you carry around without realizing it. People who love people with this disease need to educate themselves on what we need to do to manage it.

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Christians & Depression

Video: Remembering Maya Angelou

 
Hurrican Katrina
The ultimate lesson of Katrina may be the unthinkable horror of the Superdome, and the deep divisions not only between White and Black America, but between Black America itself.

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An American Disgrace

Sex & The Single Christian

Sex is something rarely discussed from the pulpit much beyond a crowd-pleasing condemnation of the behavior, a criminalizing of something God ordained to be perfect and extraordinary. This perpetuates guilt, which holds God’s people in bondage because we don’t understand what the bible actually says about this stuff and, more importantly, what those words mean.

No. 420 June 2014

Blacks In White Churches

 
White Is The New Black
I am seeing lots of persons of color in white churches. What does the migration of blacks to white MegaChurches mean for our tradition and culture?   Read Essay

 
Go To Hell
My conviction is Hell is a place where God Is Not. Hell suggests a separation from the Divine. A punishment? No, more a choice: to dwell in the presence of God, or not to.

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Go To Hell

Video: Remembering Maya Angelou

 
Neverland
With his hot new CD, I reflected upon how silent Michael Jackson’s accusers had grown in the five years since his passing. As it turns out, Jackson’s accusers have not, in fact, gone silent, and the very sad reality is coming into even tighter focus.

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Neverland

Start    America's Gun Mess    The Diet of Worms    Go To Hell    White Is The New Black    Pulpit Freedom Sunday    Neverland: What Michael Taught Us    Choice: Where Sould We Stand?    Abortion: A Preacher's Confession    Christ, The Christian & The Church    Zion: A Love Story

No. 419 May 2014

Arrogance In Leadership

 
Diotrephes Does Not Receive Us
Why are people like this, people who know, for a fact, in their heart, that they do not belong to Christ, so determined to not only be in church but to be in church leadership?
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Chimera
If you are convinced you are a Christian and yet you display no love, the voice you are hearing may not God at all but something pretending to be God.

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Who IS This Guy?

Video: First Lady's Address

 
GOP vs Obama
The world is watching the racism-fueled gridlock in Washington. It’s not necessarily Obama that Putin sees as weak, but America destroying itself with one self-created crisis after another.

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Grand Old Opprobrium

Start    Diotrephes Does Not Receive Us    Sense & Nonsense About Prayer    Knowing God's Voice    Grand Old Opprobrium    How To Make Peace With Your Church Musician    Intellect vs. Emotion    How To Make A Crooked Church Straight    Ageism: A Preacher's Confession    Zion: A Love Story

Essentials For Sisters

Women are the African American church's largest demographic, and yet most of our churches offer little in the way of useful, uncompromised insight and advice into the issues and challenges facing our sisters. This is a collection of no-holds-barred perspectives on key areas of women in the black church.

The Resurrection

We, in our ignorance, tend to make Resurrection Sunday about egg hunts for children and increased head counts at our services, exhausting ourselves with the usual pageantry while missing the sobering reality of the terrible sacrifice which earned our redemption This collection is intended to reorient our thinking about this, the Christian faith's most holy day.

The Glass House

As we struggle, year to year, to keep the church doors open, many if not most of our churches are preoccupied with one thing: church growth. Here is a collection of reasons your church is not growing, and how to overcome them.

No. 418 March 2014

American Bigotry X

 
American Bigotry X
The deaths of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, among others not as widely reported, are direct consequences of a political strategy specifically designed to reposition racism and racist attitudes as both normal and accepted within American society.
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A Woman's Place
I have no idea why enlightened, thoughtful, educated black women would come to a place that treats them like children. Where their sexuality is treated like a curse, and where God’s truth remains subjugated to the time and culture in which it was revealed.
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A Woman's Place

Video: The Murder of Jordan Davis

 
The Bible 101
These days, people prostitute the bible to mean all things for all causes. But the scriptures were never, ever, intended to be used that way. The bible, simply, reveals God to us.

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The Bible 101

Bad Salesman    The Bible 101    Off-Center    American Bigotry X    American Gothic    A Woman's Place    Trouble In The Village    Anger: A Preacher's Confession    Zion: A Love Story

Black History Essentials

Does Black History Month still matter? Media sources and retail outlets are increasingly ignoring it because they experience no measurable dropoff in black patronage when they do. If we don't care about it, why should they? And is our indifference providing momentum to the trend toward eliminating voting rights and affirmative action legislation? In this presumptively post-racial America, where is the black voice?

No. 417 February 2014

Christians should be anti-drunk, anti-wasted. This behavior abuses your body and denies God’s sovereignty on your life. We struggle with personal behavior and/or shortcomings which do not please God. This is part of the human condition, our carnal imperfection which can only be made perfect through the Holy Spirit. This is a conversation the church should have been having all along: what’s the argument against Christians smoking pot?

Weed The People

 
Weed The People
This is a conversation the church should have been having all along: what’s the argument against Christians smoking pot?
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My Pagan Valentine
St. Valentine's Day infantilizes and demeans women who, in turn, emasculate their men.
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My Pagan Valentine

Video: Classic Obama

 
East of Eden
Cain and Abel: people who sin in an effort to please God.

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Study: Conservative Christian Hatred

PraiseNet Essentials 2013

PraiseNet Essentials: 2013 Retrospective
Trust, loyalty, honor, support, faithfulness, absolute confidentiality:  all core values of both the Christian faith and the Mob. How many of those ideals do we actually practice? Somewhere along the line we have lost our way. In that respect, we could learn a lot from the Mob--at least the way the Mob is supposed to work.

The Age of Obama

As President Barack Obama completes the first year of his second term, here is a collection of essays about this historic and turbulent presidency, and this president’s constant uphill battle against irrational conservatism and racial hatred, from Election Day 2008 to the present.

No. 416 January 2014

It’s important to point out I’m not talking about dumb people or even uneducated people.
Making a conscious choice to not better ourselves, to not be better informed or more rational, makes a virtue of intellectual laziness. I blame most of this on Bart Simpson, who made under-achievement a kind of ersatz virtue. We are no longer stigmatized for being stupid which is, in and of itself, stupid.

American Intellectualism In Freefall

 
Stupid People
Making a conscious choice to not better ourselves makes a virtue of intellectual laziness. I blame most of this on Bart Simpson.
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Invictus
That a glitchy site could tarnish an entire year of a U.S. presidency speaks to how endemically fragile, and thus endemically flawed, Obama’s presidency is.
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Obama Year Five

Video: The Newsroom

 
The Blood of Jesus On Trial
If you find yourself judging others, keep in mind that you are putting the blood of Jesus on trial.

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The Blood of Jesus On Trial

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