20 Search results for "theology"

By DJ Ferguson My mother, no stranger to emotional blackmail, had no hesitation in using it on behalf of her god in an attempt to reconvert me. “Don’t you think God (Yahweh) ever mourns?” she asked, hoping to get me to feel sorry for the possessive West Asian shepherd god whom I no longer worship. […]

by Daniel Johnson  I don’t know who said it first, and I’m sure it was a Black women, but I agree with the statement that Black women do not deserve to suffer or struggle before they are honored by the Black men who claim to love them. Black women are not things that Black men […]

Creative expression did not begin with writing. It began with voice — with stories spoken across rooms, songs carried across distance, rhythms tapped into tabletops and knees when words alone could not hold what needed to be said. Long before notebooks, microphones, or publishing platforms, Black communities were shaping experience into sound and gesture so […]

Week One: Penelope French Introducing Penelope French — the gypsy soul healer and Soul Empress whose sound continues a long lineage of music shaped by Black struggle, memory, and imagination. French’s work sits at the intersection of storytelling and sonic experimentation, drawing from traditions of soul while bending genre boundaries to create something distinctly her […]

by Jo (Foderingham) Brown “When we say abolish police. We also mean the cop in your head and in your heart.” — Tourmaline Liberation theology is defined as “a movement in Christian theology that emphasizes liberation from social, political, and economic oppression.” This philosophy has been utilized in freedom struggles from Latin America to Palestine, […]

By Denarii Grace Some days I wonder if the work that I do is worth it. On the surface, Black artists/cultural workers, healers, teachers and activists who live most on the margins have the least to gain in their lines of work. And in a society based on the allure of social and financial capital, […]

By Verdell Wright I used to be a minister. I preached the goodness of God every day. But after deep reflection and honesty, I decided this Black boy had to go. I had to leave the Christian faith, as well as any belief in the supernatural, behind. I was headed toward this point for a […]

by Jamila Mitchell The emancipation of freed slaves and subsequent constitutional amendments of the 20th century meant that white people could no longer marginalize Black folks through the physical bondage of chattel slavery. Faced with new restrictions, they quickly resigned to maintaining their rule through a new age of psychological warfare on the formerly enslaved, […]

By Dilara K. Üsküp “Christianity is the white man’s religion. The Holy Bible in the white man’s hands and his interpretations of it have been the greatest single ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white human beings.” — Malcolm X (Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X & Alex Haley) While the idea that Christianity […]

by Josie Pickens Recently, singer Ciara caused some controversy when she retweeted a sermon from Pastor John Gray of Houston’s Lakewood Church, in which Gray warns single women that they need to learn to walk in the “spirit of a wife” instead of the “spirit of a girlfriend” in order to be chosen as a […]

By Ari Colston-Johnson To many, the Black Church calls to mind horror stories of cisheteropatriarchy and theologies shaped by colonialism, white supremacy, and respectability politics. But coming of age in the Gullah-Geechee African Methodist Episcopal (AME) tradition, the Black Church was a foundation for my radical politics, a space for community and Afrocentric syncretism, and […]

In 2014, Andrew Caldwell was introduced to the world via a viral video in which he proclaimed his deliverance from homosexuality at an annual COGIC convention in St. Louis. “I was already fighting for deliverance,” he told me in an interview two years later. “That night I said, ‘God, if you’re real, I want you […]