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After months of silence, the US State Department finally condemns the murders of 24 young men who were gay, or perceived to be gay.

A friend once asked Diana Butler Bass why she was still a Christian. The answer lies in the question of spiritual memory, and of a community that exists through time.

The original culture warrior has softened his rhetoric, but the message, aired all day long on various networks (it seems) is no less divisive than in the heady days of the early ’90s.

We picketed bishops and Popes, stole their dresses, stood up at the consecration of the Eucharist and said the words out loud. We are the bad girls of Catholic feminism, and we have stood up, over and over again, for women’s freedom.

Most people know only the Big-C Christianity—Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, and Christian America—but there is another one, linked to a biblical parable of a wounded man’s rescue by a stranger.

Controversial mega-pastor Rick Warren gave a little-noticed sermon at King’s home church in Atlanta on Monday. In it he seemed to dance around the controversy, invoking King’s unpopularity seemingly in reference to his.

Christians should neither excoriate Israel nor remain silent in the face of horrendous attacks in Gaza and elsewhere. Rather, according to Rev. Laarman, American Christians must heed King and make the issue about US policy and the kind of nation we aspire to be.

If King could have conceived of this day, with the coincidence of a holiday in his honor and the swearing-in of the first president of African descent, he would surely have marveled. And then he would have set us all to work.

In the journey toward white comprehension of the legacy of racism, consciousness comes slowly. But now is the time for the hard work, the time for what Dr. King called “creative action.”

We no longer have the focus of the civil rights movement or of the great leaders of that time, but we are called, nonetheless, to change our world.