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The verdict was not what I expected. I didn’t think former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin would be convicted on all three charges for the death of George Floyd. I wasn’t sure his actions would be legally labeled “murder,” both because of the details of Minnesota law and because we’ve seen the same scenario so many times before without this outcome. Anycharges—let alone murder charges, let alone murder convictions—are incredibly rare when police officers kill. But here we...

“Tell me a story.” Most of us never say these words past childhood, yet we never stop seeking out narrative threads. Indeed, we make sense of the world and one another through stories. We allow stories, whether tales from children, newly released audiobooks, or podcasts, to wash over us as we scrub the dishes or drive our daily commutes. We weave them into our mornings, afternoons, and evenings. If you find yourself longing for story but feel overwhelmed by the number of podcasts available,...

The third and final post of Dr. Sawyers thoughts and concerns on CRT. Pat Sawyer, Ph.D. Image: Canva We are launching a series on Critical Race Theory. It’s an important conversation today, since many are using the description and meaning different things. At the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, we are committed to help Christians know and engage the culture with biblical discernment, so we are launching a conversation with, well, different views. As Christians, we want to think...

Faith, race, and politics were front and center in Georgia’s US Senate runoff. Raphael Warnock, the current pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s home church, won a historic election, during which his sermons and social activism were called into question. White evangelicals were appalled by Warnock’s pulpit rebukes of police brutality and militarism. Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted a snippet of a sermon and said, “Warnock’s radical, anti-American views are disqualifying” and that he s...

Perhaps, in the decades to come, some enterprising religious historian will study how the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 affected Christian magazine journalism. Fair warning: You won’t find anything terribly eye-opening in CT’s books coverage. As the editor chiefly responsible for that coverage, I remember feeling a tad sheepish at our morning check-in meetings during those first few locked-down weeks in March and April. Updates from colleagues throbbed with urgency. They were commissioning t...

An excerpt from CT’s Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year. Here is the full list of CT’s 2021 Book Award winners. I was eight years old the first time someone called me a nigger. It happened in elementary school one morning when I started to feel sick. I was in bad enough shape to call my mother at her factory job at Chrysler. I dutifully went to the school office, where they dialed the number on the emergency contact card and handed me the phone. Nervously, I asked to speak with Laurie McC...

Image: Courtesy of Chauncey Allmond Chauncey Allmond dreams of a day when white evangelical preachers will reference the work of African American Bible scholars without even thinking about it. He and his colleagues at Logos Bible Software hope they can make that happen by adding more African American voices to the digital study tools currently used by more than 4.5 million people. “The African American voice is a powerful voice that needs to be heard,” Allmond said. “There’...