The Scroll 11/15/13: Top Five Christian Articles of the Week

1.   To Redeem the Soul of the Black Church

Fifty years ago a preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. came with others to our nation's capitol, challenging America to "live out the true meaning of its creed." The son and grandson of activist preachers, King was a child of the black church, a church born fighting for freedom. Accordingly, he and others organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 not simply to dismantle segregation but with this motto: "To Redeem The Soul of America...continue reading

2.   To Proclaim Freedom For The Prisoners: A Letter To Marissa Alexander #FreeMarissaNow

To Miss Marissa Alexander of Florida,
First of all, I would like to say thank you, Ms. Alexander for sharing your story with the world. No matter how much the white supremacist system we call “The Prison-Industrial-Complex” may try to suppress the truth, I am grateful that you are working to expose it by contending your innocence as well as your basic right as a human being to defend yourself from life-threatening abuse...continue reading

3.   The Lack of Black Bruins at UCLA: The Questions

For the past few days many have caught wind of the lack of diversity at UCLA by way of a YouTube video that has been making the rounds on social media and news outlets. Sy Stokes, the lead in the video, is a spoken-word artist in his junior at the university. Stokes is backed by a phalanx of silent black male UCLA students as he drops statistics about UCLA’s black male student population as of the 2012-2013 school year...continue reading

4.   Going Beyond Purity

I grew up as a Latina in the Assemblies of God and I distinctly remember promising to wait to have sex until marriage with the song “Promise” by Jaci Velasquez playing in the background, I was 13. I remember this so clearly because the following the year a friend of mine from that church was brutally gang raped; she was a year younger than me...continue reading

5.   What Good Is a Ph.D. for Reading the Bible?

When I was a Ph.D. candidate in Yale University's New Testament program, I had the honor of preaching at an ordination service for a classmate who was being ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Following the service, a number of my classmates asked me why I wanted to spend four-seven years working on a Ph.D. in New Testament when I clearly had a "gift" for preaching. I responded that it was actually my academic study of the Bible coupled with my life experiences that illumined and enlivened my preaching...continue reading