I remember the first time I heard Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues,” a song about winning and losing in life. I was 10 years old, attempting to explain the lyrics to my father. Sitting across from me in the kitchen of our old apartment, his acoustic guitar across his lap, my father respo
Racial Justice
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
Growing in Faith
A mother reflects on her daughter’s experience of growing up black and Catholic.
Posted inFaith
The witness of Sister Thea Bowman
Sister Thea did not hesitate to challenge and even chide the bishops for their complicity in a “church of paternalism, of a patronizing attitude” toward people of color.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
Saved by Grace: Striving for a more racially just and equal church
“I am asked how I can remain Catholic when the church I now serve in had ownership of a member of my family.” – Cora Marie Billings, R.S.M.
Posted inFaith
Black theology and a legacy of oppression
After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., James H. Cone denounced the lukewarm responses of mainline Protestant and Catholic Christians to the plight of black Americans.
Posted inPolitics & Society
A Professor, a President and the Klan
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (May 1954), racial tensions in Alabama heightened considerably. When in February 1956 Autherine Lucy, a black student, began attending class at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, white students and community membe
Posted inPolitics & Society, Vantage Point
Will this prophet be heard? America’s editors on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Vantage Point April 20, 1968: The editors on the death and dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.