Category: Ecumenical
Rights & Rituals: Black Women and Nonviolent Intimacy
Brokering peace takes the same formation from war paths, through the streets, and into our homes. Black women are more than twice as likely than white women to be killed by an intimate partner. Our bedrooms are battlefields. But we can write a new testament of intimacy that does not threaten our lives to stay or chase us to death if we leave. An intimacy that holds us without violence. An intimacy that is peace, that cherishes and generates peace.
Africa University gets first AME member on development board
Monifa McKnight, 50, an entrepreneur and educator from Maryland, is the first non-United Methodist to sit on the executive board of Africa University (Tennessee) Inc.
The African Methodist Episcopal lay member, who spent 26 years working in kindergarten to grade 12 education, was excited to be appointed to the board of a tertiary institution.
Autocratization in the USA
In my forthcoming book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy, I wrestle with these challenging questions: Where are we exactly as a nation? And what is our responsibility in such a time?
Even with the daily headlines documenting the diminishment of our nation as a pluralistic democracy, I still have conversations with well-informed people who continue to doubt—to hope against hope—that things are really not as bad as they seem, that the guardrails will hold, that the pendulum will magically swing back. The new V-Dem report provides an evidence-based reality check that should banish any remaining naiveté that the U.S. can any longer be considered a functioning pluralistic democracy.