In her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race, Beverly Daniel Tatum provides a well-known metaphor for systemic racism as an airport terminal walkway: Because racism is ingrained in the fabric of American institutions, it is easily self-perpetuating. …

In the Torah, God instructs his people to a life of generosity with three major tithes in the seven-year agricultural cycle. The first tithe (ma’aser rishon) required one tenth of agricultural produce to be given to the Levites every year after the giving of an offering (see Numbers 18:21–26). The…

The following is from our church’s Racial Justice Reflections that are published monthly in our worship folder. In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. makes a surprising remark that the greatest barrier to the work of racial equity is not those who were outright opposed to…

The following is from our church’s Racial Justice Reflections that are published monthly in our worship folder. A commonly held idea for responding to the ugliness of racism, including within the church, is racial colorblindness, the idea that it is a virtue to ignore race. This can be seen in…

The following is from our church’s Racial Justice Reflections that are published monthly in our worship folder. In Numbers 35:6–34, Joshua 20, and Deuteronomy 19:1–13, we read about a peculiar instruction for God’s people to designate cities of refuge. Prior to the cities of refuge, if a person was killed…

The analogia fidei (“analogy of faith”) was an important Reformational principle of biblical interpretation that claimed, as attested by the Westminster Confession of Faith: The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any…

Years ago, I helped teach an adult Sunday School class on the Apostles’ Creed. I shared this story that has been passed down in my family. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the story. I want to begin this class with a story about a family song. Some of…

It is already a well-researched fact that Presbyterians in the United States individually owned enslaved people. What people may not know is that Presbyterian congregations as a body would also regularly own enslaved people, lease them out to others, and use these profits in order to fund endowments, pastors’ salaries…

In the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, I witnessed several churches in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), my own denomination, post statements of their support of anti-racism, provide suggested reading lists of anti-racist books, and even preach sermons on the Christian work of anti-racism. …