The most-read Taking Jesus Seriously posts

Here are the most-read posts of the year from Drew Hart's blog:

1) The social gospel of Ta-Nehisi Coates, guest post by Daniel José Camacho. On its face, for me to talk about Coates’s social gospel is absurd. Yet I find his words to be deeply insightful and helpful for thinking not only about race, society, and U.S. history, but about the relationship faith has within that nexus.

2) God loves gentrification, guest post by Daniel José Camacho. What does it mean that the popularity of predominately white church plants in inner cities has grown precisely as gentrification has spiked?

3) When white people are never racist. “We’ll, I’m no racist” they explained. Who is they? The countless white people that have engaged me in conversation over the years.

4) Jesus allergies. The term "biblical" has the potential to mask all sorts of behaviors that don’t look anything like Jesus, but claim them to somehow be “Christian."

5) Why James H. Cone's liberation theology matters more than ever, guest post by Daniel José Camacho. Cone’s project is not simply about experience. It is a direct assault on theology’s entanglement with white racism.

6) Should the church take sides or stay neutral with the #BlackLivesMatter movement? When is it the right time to take sides, standing with those that live with the daily threat of violence, suffering, and death? Who decides?

7) A book to redirect our conversations on race. Where the Church is supposed to shine its bright light into the darkness, it has instead too frequently been nothing but a dark hole of despair.

8) How an early church theologian can help us subvert white supremacy. It is precisely in the specificity of Jesus’ manifestation on earth that The Epistle to Diognetus, a late-2nd-century Christian letter, points to God’s revelation and character.

9) Neo-Anabaptist myths and Mennonite reality on the problem of white homogeneity in Anabaptist communities. It is usually a white male neo-Anabaptist wrestling with why all their Anabaptist networks are dominated by white people.

10) Why you should stop assuming Jesus is with you. Actually following Jesus can be scary. It requires constant faith, and it often results in risky life. Besides, who wants to be led around by Jesus anyway?

11) Open to a new year and new possibilities with God. The reality of Jesus Christ and God’s in-breaking Kingdom always is a word of possibility, even within the belly of the imperial beast that claims significant change is impossible.

12) Why black Christians are not off the hook. In some spaces, stories are told of glass ceilings but with no mention of those stuck in the basement.

13) Good Friday and the stories of Jesus. If we are going to reflect on the death of Jesus, then we must also consider the contradictions of whitened Christianity that has for centuries practiced and permitted limitless violence against black bodies—while clinging simultaneously to the old rugged cross.

14) My endorsement of Malestrom by Carolyn Custis James. Finding a crack in the door of patriarchy, which still patterns the life of both the church and the world, James swings it wide open.

15) Dialogue matters. In 1960, when Vincent Harding moved to Atlanta, he began trying to weld together the ongoing nonviolent activism being lived out by some in the Black Church with the peace witness of the Mennonite Church.