A reading for Advent and a meditation: Isaiah 59:7 Their feet run to evil and they hasten to pour out innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, violence and brokenness are in their highways. 8 The path of peace they do not know and there is no justice in their pathways. Their courses they...... Read More

Girls, black like me, abducted to be sex slaves and not for the first time, not for the last time. Tweet this Abandoned to their fate, all but forgotten. It looks like no one will #BringBackOurGirls. Some of them have brought themselves back. Hundreds of people lost on a flight and then again hundreds more lost...... Read More

(Photo: Reuters) It’s in the soil. It’s in the air. It’s in the water. It’s as American as apple pie. Racism perfuses the soil and soul of Ferguson MO as it does everywhere in these (dis)United States and the Western world. click to tweet It is our legacy and the stuff shaping the building blocks of...... Read More

Between Tuesday and Thursday last week I drove one thousand six hundred and eighty miles to move immigrate to Fort Worth, Texas. The plan was that Dad and I would rent a vehicle for the stuff the professional movers shouldn’t/couldn’t move – like the cats and all their accessories – and tow my car. What...... Read More

By request, repost of 2008 blog (now defunct) on literary evolution of Hell in the bible: In the synoptic Gospels, Hell is usually described as a realm of fire, a place that seemingly judges and punishes at the same time, (Matthew 5:22, 29–30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5). The most...... Read More

My ancestors passed down this lament: Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, A long way from home. Sometimes mother is the hardest word. Sometimes mother is a curse word ~ not the object of a profane expression, but the subject....... Read More

This is a wailing; and it shall be wailed. The women of the world shall wail it. Over Nubia and all its nations they shall wail it, says the SOVEREIGN God. Ezekiel 32:16 My Lament My eyes grieve continually for the souls of all the daughters who are raped. My eyes grieve continually for the...... Read More

For many, marriage is a sacrament or a covenant given by God, an institution that is rooted in love and gives rise to more love through the interweaving of families and sometimes the nurture of children. For many of my conversation partners in the past three weeks, the notion that trafficked girls could be sold...... Read More

Today black women in the United States and perhaps some of our allies are wearing geles, traditional West African head wraps like those worn in Nigeria to call attention to the hundreds of our daughters, kidnapped and sold like the Israelite daughters at Shiloh more than three thousand years ago. Some folk still have not...... Read More

Using sources in Genesis, the books of Enoch – which are scriptural in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church – and his own interpretive imagination, Darren Aronofsky has given the world a new vision of the Noah story. His vision is eclipsed by its blinding whiteness, (see my take on his white savior saving a world full...... Read More