2014
Almost 50 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of America.” Sometimes we Christians want to believe that the Gospel has helped us as the Church achieve what our country has not—becoming ...
One of the first prayers I learned as a child was the debtor’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. You know, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” It wasn’t until this past year, however, that those words became real to me.
When my wife ...
How can Christians seek racial reconciliation, justice and healing? Attempting to answer that question means reckoning with racism. But as a member of the ethnic group that has enjoyed disproportionate power and privilege because of systemic and other forms of racism, attempting ...
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or ...
I became a Christian at the age of 22, by way of someone I never would have expected. It was the summer of 1998, four years prior to me submitting my life to the Lord. I was leading a private camp and awaiting the arrival of my assistant. She bounced in with her blonde ponytail, ...
"Romesh, sorry, we can't 'go together' anymore, my mom says I'm not allowed." --my first girlfriend in 6th grade, who was part of a white evangelical family.
"Romesh, we are not allowed to date, the Bible says that interracial dating is a ...
I will never forget sitting at the dinner table with a group of college friends when one of them, a white young man I didn't know all that well, made a disparaging remark about taking a "big black girl" to an upcoming formal dance. I didn't laugh along with ...
My husband Peter and I were walking on the beach the other day. Even though she was far away, with her back to us and her body halfway submerged in water, we knew. She turned around and her face assured us. She had Down syndrome, just like our daughter Penny. We were away ...
I've been aware of Christopher Beha's writing for a few years now. I still sometimes find myself thinking about his coming-of-age novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder, and just this summer I raced through his memoir about reading the Harvard Classics, The Whole Five ...
For anyone who lives in New England, the weather this summer has been lovely. The app on my phone keeps predicting relatively low humidity, sunshine, a slight breeze and a chance of a thunderstorm overnight to keep the grass growing and the temperatures lower than usual.
On ...
Yesterday I wrote about my ongoing search for chapter books for my kids with African American protagonists. I have only just begun to look, so I cannot personally recommend all the books on this list. But from asking other parents, librarians, and teachers, here are a few books ...
We've been reading chapter books with our two older kids—Penny, now 8, and William, nearly 6—for a few years now. We generally stick to the classics: Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte's Web, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Little House on the Prairie, ...
Recently, I was reading the Bible and thinking about Bob Marley. In the parable of the four soils, Jesus describes worry as one of the things that thwarts our spiritual growth (the other thing he cites as a problem is pleasure, which is a post for another day). A few chapters ...
Last week I wrote a post called "Let Kids Be Kids Instead of Sexualized Little Adults," in response to a YouTube video about a "transgender" girl whose parents helped her "transition" into a boy at age 6. I cautioned against the idea that children's ...
For a long time, my little sister Elly was a boy. It started on her second birthday, when she received her gift from Kate, another of my sisters (I'm the oldest of four girls). Elly opened the box—a blue corduroy dress Kate and my mother had stitched themselves—and ...
2015
