Thomas Chatterton Williams, a fierce critic of identity politics, urges readers to move beyond a black-white binary in discussing or thinking about race in the United States.
Racial Justice
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
What a forgotten Black nun can teach us about racism and Covid-19
Since the outbreak of Covid-19, I have thought often about Sister Mary Anthony Duchemin and the extraordinary sacrifice that she made to the church and community at large in 1832.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
When the racist response to Covid-19 hits home
I have traveled all over the world, yet I have never felt the need to hide my ethnicity until now, in my own hometown, New York City.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
This Lent, U.S. Catholics are called to reckon with the sin of capital punishment
In the middle lands of these 40 days, I am burdened by the fact that our society has not yet reckoned with the ongoing sin of capital punishment nor the full extent of our country’s racist past.
Posted inDispatches, Politics & Society
The Catholic sisters who confronted their own legacy of racism
The Dominican sisters are motivated by a recognition that the blinding racism that allowed nuns to buy and sell human beings in the past could blind them to their own complicity in racist structure today.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
The black Catholic nun every American should know
When Anne Marie Becraft established her school in the midst of the nation’s and the church’s slaveholding elite, she powerfully declared that the lives of black people, especially women and girls, mattered.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Review: Broadway’s new ‘West Side Story’ is at war with itself
The show’s extreme makeover casts something of a spell but it comes off more and more like a self-serious period piece with some kicking tunes.
Posted inFaith, Jesuitical
The importance of learning the stories of the enslaved people owned by the Jesuits
There is still much that remains unknown about the enslaved people owned, rented and borrowed by the Catholic Church.
Posted inFaith, News Analysis
Can Catholic school hair grooming standards be discriminatory?
Disputes regarding the enforcement of hair grooming standards at religious schools require application of fundamental church-and-state principles that are unique to the United States.
Posted inEditorials, Politics & Society
The Editors: Martin Luther King’s radical politics were rooted in radical Christian love
As we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. this month, it is worth remembering that despite the intensely political nature of his ministry and activism, Dr. King was himself not a politician so much as a prophet.