Walter Earl Fluker’s call to the Black church
In King’s time, the goal was to stir the churches to struggle. Now it’s to wake the dead.
What is democratic socialism, and where is it headed?
The complex history—and promising future—of a movement
Between the world and Ta-Nehisi Coates
How did an Afro-pessimist who doesn't believe in hope become the darling of white liberals?
Trump is a threat to democracy. How can we defend it?
The authoritarian nationalism of the 20th century never quite died. And Americans now aren't wiser than Europeans then.
The church's respectability politics: Black Lives Matter symposium
The young people leading this movement have heard enough about Martin Luther King's dream. It is not enough for church leaders to reply that they don't know much history.
Unintended aid: Resident Aliens at 25
Denigrating "social activist churches" was central to Hauerwas and Willimon's agenda. Yet Resident Aliens revived social gospel arguments.
The case against Wall Street: Why the protesters are angry
The protesters sleeping in the cold do not claim that 99 percent of Americans agree with them. Their point is that the top 1 percent plays by different rules.
No common good?
The common good is taking a beating. Economic inequality has accelerated dramatically since the early 1980s, and many think nothing can be done about it. But that verdict is a nonstarter for Christian morality.
Health-care fix: The role of a public option
Longtime advocates of single-payer insurance like me are thrilled, anxious and deflated simultaneously by the state of the debate on health-care reform. The debate that we wanted has finally come, and it is coming with a legislative rush, but the plan that we wanted is being excluded from consideration. Should we hold out for the real thing, or get behind the best politically possible thing?
I am for doing both: Standing up for single-payer without holding out for it exclusively; supporting a public option without denying its limitations; and hoping that a good public plan will lead eventually to real national health insurance.
Financial collapse: Lessons from the Social Gospel
The current meltdown is just a bigger version of the dot-com bust of the 1990s, with the usual lessons about financial bubbles. But this crisis is harder to swallow, because it starts with people who were just trying to buy a house, who usually had no understanding of predatory lending or derivatives schemes. It was a mystery how the banks did it, but you trusted that they knew what they were doing. Your bank resold the mortgage to an aggregator who bunched it up with thousands of other subprime mortgages, chopped the package into small pieces, and sold them as corporate bonds to parties looking for extra yield. Your mortgage payments paid for the interest on the bonds.
Kingdom coming: Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis
In the 1880s Walter Rauschenbusch was a Baptist pastor in the Hell’s Kitchen district of New York City, where he served a poor, hurting, immigrant congregation and where he converted to the social ...
After the surge: Getting out of Iraq
The weekly death tolls in Iraq have recently decreased—for four reasons: The U.S....
Hope or hype?
The Obama phenomenon is hurtling past the best analogies that we have for it....
Grand illusion: Costs of war and empire
Many blame Rumsfeld and the neoconservative idealogues for the disaster in Iraq. But the current foreign-policy crisis vastly exceeds their mistakes. President Bush is still talking about “winning in Iraq” and “fulfilling the mission,” and his administration is still loaded with people who want him to stake his legacy on doing so. The neoconservative ideology of his administration is merely an exaggerated version of the normal politics of American empire. Before a significant change for the better is possible, Americans must reckon with the costs of the nation's perpetual war and military empire.
The waters of solidarity: On the brink of civil war
In the 1950s, the CIA invented the term blowback as a marker for the ricochet effect of its covert actions. Since then the term has come to signify the backlash and other unintended consequences of intervening in foreign countries. For three years the U.S. has coped with a blowback nightmare in Iraq; now it is teetering on the edge of something even worse. Meanwhile the architects of the war still want to attack Iran and Syria, but find themselves enmeshed in the grim consequences of invading Iraq.
