Yesterday’s exchange with a stranger on Facebook who saw Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize winning picture and my accompanying prayer and proceeded to explain why my prayer, with its inappropriate, “Mother-Spirit” language, would not be heard and why I, an “unsaved sinner” would not be answered, sparked some thinking and praying yesterday.  By “thinking” I mean…

Forgive me, Father God, for seeking shelter in the statistics, so that I might never have been obliged to know that somewhere in the middle of the Sudan, an abandoned child bowed down to You in starvation, waiting to become a vulture’s next meal. Help my unbelief, Friend and Brother Jesus Christ, when I doubt…

“How do we embrace the toil of freedom?” That is the question that friend, screenwriter and producer Okorie Johnson sets out to answer in his forthcoming film, “Canopy.” As an introspective look at how one particular African American struggles to pursue his dreams in his own context (Atlanta, Georgia), the film lifts up one unique…

This video is an intimate look at the systemic nature of the commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking of women and girls.  The woman in the video who is narrating the story is herself a survivor of sexual exploitation, and she, through a ministry called “GEMS,” has since dedicated her life to helping some of…

20,000 children will lead the May 2012 World Prayer Assembly in prayer for the world. Wow. Which begs the question: can prayer be social justice?  After watching this video sent on by organizers of the May 2012 “World Prayer Assembly” in Jakarta, Indonesia, I am tempted to think so, albeit with some hesitations. (Incidentally, if…

When today we honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., who in 1964 received the Nobel Peace Prize for his heroic and painstaking work as a civil rights activist, I am struck by King’s words on the eve of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.  At the time, King was a young, relatively unknown…

“Jesus said to him, ‘What do you think, Simon?  When the kings of the world collect taxes or duties, who do they collect from?  From their own families, or from outsiders?’ ‘From outsiders,’ he replied. ‘Well then,’ said Jesus, ‘that means the families are free.  But we don’t want to give them offense, do we?…

“Make ready for the Christ, whose smile- like lightning- sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps in your paper flesh- like dynamite.”-Thomas Merton Just the other day my son played his first basketball game as the only white kid in the 6-and-under age category on his team, “The Freedom Riders,” (which plays…

“Foxes have their dens and the birds in the air have their nests.  But the son of man has nowhere he can lay his head.”  Matthew 8:20 “Black Friday” has come and gone, but the staggering figures remain.  Americans spent a whopping $11.4 billion, averaging $400 per consumer- the most ever spent on a single…

“How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!…It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  Mark 10:23, 24 The rich, young man’s story is one many of us have heard many times…

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