“If we can change the kids, we can have a better world. But it starts with the parents,” says Rev. Troy Lawrence Sr. of Reaping the Harvest, a Full Gospel Baptist Church in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. He spoke with R&E about gun violence at a peace festival last summer. “Let it be about the kids. If we can save the kids, we can save this next generation.” More →

November 23, 2015

“I didn’t come out of the church. I don’t have an intuitive understanding of what religion gives to people. I just don’t. I didn’t really grow up in a Christian household,” says the author of Between the World and Me. “I’m very distanced from that. For both good and ill, it probably marks my writing.” More →

November 20, 2015

“We are trying to convey to the folks that the right to vote is a civic sacrament, and the voting booth is in fact the altar of our democracy. And for us to allow voter disenfranchisement and suppression to go on is a desecration of both,” says NAACP president Cornell Brooks, who led the America’s Journey for Justice march to Washington, D.C. More →

September 18, 2015

“The story of the seder, the story of freedom and justice, is a universal story. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that just about everything we do stems from this story—this idea that we were slaves, and we were freed, and now it’s our responsibility to work for freedom for people all over the world,” says Rabbi Shira Stutman, director of Jewish programming at Historic Sixth & I Synagogue. More →

April 3, 2015

“We were willing to be beaten for democracy,” says Rev. C.T. Vivian, recalling the freedom movement and voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. It was, he says, “the beginning of the transformation of America.” More →

March 20, 2015

“The church had been waking up to the need for race reform in the post-war era,” says Georgia State University history professor Glenn Eskew. “The change had been slow among the establishment within the churches from the top down, but from the seminarians, the young people from the bottom up—they embraced the movement. They embraced the idea of racial change.” More →

March 20, 2015

Black and white religious leaders in Ferguson, Missouri, are trying to help their divided community heal. “Here is an opportunity, a living laboratory by which we try intentionally to work toward that beloved community that Dr. King invited us to,” … More →

January 16, 2015

An interpretation of Jesus’ teachings that emphasizes wealth and prosperity seems to be spreading fast, especially in many African-American churches. But critics are calling the “prosperity gospel” a distortion of authentic Christian faith. More →

August 17, 2007

A WASHINGTON POST-ABC NEWS poll asked American whites and blacks whether they support or oppose the U.S. having gone to war in Iraq. Among whites, 78 percent said they support the war. But among African-Americans, just 35 percent supported. Of all African-Americans, the most conflicted may be African-American Muslims, who make up about a third of all Muslims in the U.S. More →

March 28, 2003