Just Human: Black stories are most rewarded when they center blackness — which, in a certain sense, is to center whiteness

It is a cool autumn morn­ing and I am perched on my couch, a cof­fee cup near­by, a few pages into Clau­dia Rankine’s newest book, Just Us: An Amer­i­can Con­ver­sa­tion. My 14-year-old son saun­ters in and asks what I am read­ing when I look up over the brim to tell him: “It’s a book on race by […]

Read More Just Human: Black sto­ries are most reward­ed when they cen­ter black­ness — which, in a cer­tain sense, is to cen­ter whiteness

Watch… You Will See

Jesus was 33 when he died. There is some­thing enchant­i­ng about that. I feel old. Prob­a­bly because many peo­ple I meet are younger than me and things didn’t used to be this way. But still, I feel like I have so much life left to live. Here are my reflec­tions on my 33rd year of life and my won­ders for my 34th.

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The Single Parent Solution

My 8‑year-old twins have a prob­lem. There are three sides to the sto­ry. The Black Fam­i­ly in Amer­i­ca has suf­fered tremen­dous set­backs since our arrival over 400 years ago. In recent decades, some, like Bill Cos­by in his infa­mous  2004 com­ments and sub­se­quent book “Come On Peo­ple,” have placed the blame on the black com­mu­ni­ty, itself, […]

Read More The Sin­gle Par­ent Solution

Hitler: Before He Met the Devil

     He was 9 years old when the offi­cer brought the news. The knock was strong and hard and his father’s foot­steps were heavy on the wood­en floor­boards. The door swung open and the fog­gy night air brought with it, a dense mois­ture, the thick smell of dying things and the dev­il. Klara […]

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The Single Parent’s Secret

I recent­ly became a con­trib­u­tor to my church’s newslet­ter “The Cal­vary Con­nec­tion”. My col­umn titled Fruit of the Womb will focus on par­ent­ing from a bib­li­cal per­spec­tive and is tak­en from the ref­er­ence to chil­dren in Psalms 127:3. It reads “Behold, chil­dren are a her­itage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a […]

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The Malaysian Plane, Sandy Hook, 9/11 and Haiti Through Another Lens

Opti­cal illu­sions are some­times fun. The pic­ture with a thou­sand dots that at first seem to form noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar until you stare through the pic­ture and not at it, or per­haps at a par­tic­u­lar point on the pic­ture. Your eyes glaze over, and then anoth­er image is evi­dent, one you did not read­i­ly see […]

Read More The Malaysian Plane, Sandy Hook, 9/11 and Haiti Through Anoth­er Lens