the-ones-about-families
When God reveals you prefer whiteness: A response to Gaye Clark by Sean Palmer
Most white Americans believe whiteness is normal and preferable. America’s cultural myth is that Caucasians from European descent are the heroes of the American story. It’s what made America great and what some believe will make America great again.
How to raise confident multiracial children by Chantilly Pantino.
While our nation is increasingly diverse, there are still factors that can leave kids feeling less than confident about their heritage and wondering where they fit in. This can cause them to feel marginalized on both sides or like they have to identify with one ethnicity over the other.
The conservative, Christian case for working women by Jonathan Merritt.
“All women are called to have influence—cultural influence outside of the private sphere of the home,” Beaty said. “It wouldn’t necessarily have to be a career track, but certainly all Christians, including all Christian women, are called to have cultural influence outside the home.”
About those “20 minutes of action”: 20 things we’d better tell our sons right now about being real men by Ann Voskamp
Because a Stanford doesn’t begin with alcohol and it doesn’t begin with partying kids with inflated egos and it doesn’t begin with 20 minutes of not using your head but your hormones.
It begins with a woman like me bringing home a man-child in her arms, one mama unwrapping that blanket and what it means to raise up a man.
the-ones-about-race-and-culture
What we can learn from the only white kid on this high school step team by Rachel Pieh Jones
The dance begins. The boys stomp and clap and tumble and flip through the air in an intense and relentless rhythm. Within seconds, the students are on their feet, cheering. They focus on Emmaus and at the end of the performance — when the team points him out and calls him their nickname, “White Chocolate” — the students go nuts shouting and clapping for their classmate.
Picking up the trash of white supremacy by Abby Norman
Essentially white communities are asking black people to live an experience that is set up to be far more difficult for them, and succeed by white standards. AND THEN we are asking them to re-live and explain it all over again in front of us so that we will believe them. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we don’t believe them. And the astounding thing is how many times black women are willing to risk it to help their white sisters understand. But that isn’t their job.
Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local by Taiye Salasi
the-ones-that-made-me-grin
Things I’m doing before going to hell by John Pavlovitz
I’m doing them because my deepest faith convictions tell me to try and make this place more like however I believe Heaven to be, and that this will bring justice and mercy along with it.
White savior barbie nails it by Rachel Pieh Jones
Perhaps the lesson of White Savior Barbie is that there is nothing wrong with service or with enjoying another culture but it needs to be done with integrity. Let’s be qualified and well trained for the work we do. Develop authentic relationships based on more than great photo ops. Educate ourselves. Be wary of quick clichés like, “I fell in love with Africa the moment I got off the plane.” Be learners.
Pakistani Muslim villagers are building a church for their Christian neighbors by Relevant Magazine
The BBC has reported from a village in Pakistan where Christians and Muslims are refusing to engage in violence, and instead, live side-by-side in real community.
Angels to block Westboro Baptist Church’s protest at Orland memorial by Beth Spotswood
Angels really do exist — at least in Orlando. When the reviled hate group Westboro Baptist Church announced that it would be picketing the funerals of the victims of the Orlando gay bar shooting tragedy, a group of actors decided to fight back in a decidedly heavenly way.
the-ones-about-the-election
A good man justifies a wicked deed: Grudem on Trump by John Mark N. Reynolds
Manifestly men of goodwill can disagree, but they should not, because Donald J. Trump is uniquely unsuited for the most powerful job on the planet. He is morally unfit, unqualified, and advocating for him stains any person who does so.
Donald Trump and the Violence to Come by Peter Binart
“The United States is headed toward a confrontation, the likes of which it has not seen since 1968, between leftist activists, who believe in physical disruption as a means of drawing attention to injustice, and a candidate eager to forcibly put down that disruption in order to make himself look tough.”
Popular-on-Between-Worlds
To the White church who did not pray for the black man on Sunday
But Sunday, if you did not pray for the black man right alongside the police man, you missed the heart of God. If a black man had sat in your midst and heard you pray only for the police man and the police man’s family, but not the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the decades of innocent black men killed by police men, I would not have blamed him for standing and shouting out in the middle of your prayer, “What the hell about me?! Do you care about me at all?!” And I would not have blamed him if he stormed out of your sanctuary and wept on your steps, desperate because he found no sanctuary in your midst.
Onward through the fog: Practicing faith when you can’t see where you’re going
“Onward through the fog,” our program director would tell us as we struggled to understand the broken dynamics shaping the community around us. It’s a phrase I’ve lived ever since. In fact, fog has become one of my go-to analogies for understanding the liminal spaces of life—those thresholds in life when there’s not yet a clear answer.
between worlds 