Hard Truths

HARD TRUTHS   Remembering George Floyd: Who are the Criminals? “Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them."   Gen. 6: 11-13, KJV) In Equal Rights , his haunting salute to the Black struggle in the 1970s, Jamaican Conscious Reggae singer the late Peter Tosh says it like no-one else: “Everyone is talking about crime…Tell me who are the criminals… Everyone is heading for the top. But tell me, how far is it from the bottom?” Like Black people everywhere, many of my White friends have reached out to us for help in making sense of the pent up anger that has exploded into the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. In response to these requests we are sometimes tempted to  channel award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodg...

HARD TRUTHS   Remembering George Floyd: Where's the Social Gospel? “We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life” . Pope Francis on the killing of George Floyd              I grew up during the 1970s in evangelical churches. We lived in the shadow of the turbulent 60s, a time when like the response to George Floyd’s death, former colonized peoples pushed against the knees of their oppressors on their necks. Angola. Jamaica. Zimbabwe. Cuba. Albania. Kenya. Many Latin American countries. Here in North America Watts and Harlem burned, triggering the by now familiar response to the revolutionary call of Black Power.                         Maybe it was the urgency of the times. Or maybe it was because evangelicals were ‘heavenly minded...