Building a theology of lament in a breathless & racialized land — God calls us to lament, then love. My dear friend recently shared a story with me. A woman she knows was bringing water to peaceful protestors demonstrating outside St. John’s Church after George Floyd’s death. Officers tear-gassed the crowd to clear these bodies so Donald Trump could get the now…

Don Gathers as Activist & Witness — Don Gathers was on the streets of Charlottesville on August 12, 2017: That Saturday when we got called to race down to Water Street. It was like a bomb had exploded in the intersection. There were bodies literally everywhere. Just blood and broken bones just all over the place. I…

Violence is not the ultimate answer but neither is a dismissal of pain — There is a parallel between parenting and protest. I do not mean that the parents of the world don weapons, shields, and signs and head out to maintain familial peace, leading to cries for “law and order.” We are not at war against our children. I mean that our goal…

Charlottesville’s former Vice Mayor and current co-chair of Our Black Party talks monuments, politics, & family — It was July 8, 2016 when Dr. Wes Bellamy got married, just four months after Zyahna Bryant sent her letter to The Daily Progress and published her petition to remove the Robert E. Lee statue and rename Lee Park. This was Bellamy’s first year on the Charlottesville City Council, the…

Redefining the Power of the Black Vote — “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” -James Baldwin A new political party is making history, and they know they are doing it. “We have to be very clear,” says Dr. Wes Bellamy. “Before you were a Democrat…

Black Lives Matter Shows the Heart of the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life Debate — For years my wife tried to buy me books. Sometimes she cheated a bit and looked at my Amazon Wish List or flat out asked me what I wanted. But on the occasions when she tried to find a book I might like for Christmas or my birthday without knowing…

A conversation with one of the nation’s foremost young activists — My favorite image of Zyahna Bryant is one of her standing before Charlottesville, Virginia’s statue of Robert E. Lee. The 19-year-old activist seems to face it down as well as anyone who might oppose her demands to have it removed. It began in 2016, when Bryant, then a freshman at…

The President Is Neither Machiavelli’s Prince Nor Erasmus’ — Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale has a category for some of its post-apocalyptic survivors, people living under a government that suspended and then abolished the Constitution, people oppressed by a regime that organizes its society around a human’s ability to reproduce. She calls them “true believers,” and they are…

Why Conservatives Should Embrace the Black Lives Matter Movement Three years ago on August 12 my friend was on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. The Alt Right, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacists as well as antifa, Black Lives Matter folk, and other antiracists gathered, clashed, and protested against each other’s…