Maybe the real “straight-talk express” should run for the nation’s highest office himself; the one test for president Wright cannot pass is the one the mainstream media insist on more than any other.
King’s reputation and influence suffered in the four years after his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Even Obama, who rides high on a tide of popularity, is not immune to the vagaries of history.
There is a temptation to regard Obama’s inauguration as the end of a forty year “wilderness” experience, but symbolism and symmetry can only take us so far. We, as citizens, are going to need to hold Obama accountable.
The numbers are in and you, the reader, have chosen your favorite RD stories of the year; from Rick Warren to AIPAC, Sarah Palin, Creationism 2.0 and the fabled “death” of the religious right.
A professor of African-American religious history talks about teaching with a heavy heart, year after year, about the truths of racism. With the election of Barack Obama, this year will be different, but the journey of healing has only just begun.
Is authentic religious commitment incompatible with critical thinking, reason, or compromise, as philosopher Simon Critchley seems to imply in a recent essay on Obama? Or is our challenge to refuse the false oppositions between total transformation and conflict, or politics and piety?
It has become common to blame the black community for the passage of California’s same-sex marriage ban. A look at the statistics and logic put the lie to this seductive and simplistic narrative.
