Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.…
Remarks delivered at “Critical Conversations: Gun Sense,” convened at the Baltimore-Washington Conference Mission Center by Bishop LaTrelle Easterling, October 17, 2017. Dr. Susan Henry-Crowe has spoken already to the policy and advocacy side of the question here today. I have been invited to address a theological perspective. As any good Methodist, I am naturally drawn…
Perhaps you have seen the news reports of the vile letter that was sent to a number of mosques throughout the country, threatening genocide against Muslims in the wake of Donald Trump's election. The accompanying photograph of the handwritten note shows the letter signed "Americans for a Better Way." Well, the earliest Christians were called…
The debate about the relationship of the Church to the Biblical people of Israel is a centuries-long and enduring one. But the relationship of the Church to its own churches should be an obvious one: to love them as Christ has loved us. And choosing Zionism—indeed choosing any state loyalty over our brothers and sisters in Christ is fundamentally at odds with this command of Jesus.
If we truly love our neighbors, then we care about their well-being. Voting, then, is not an exercise in insuring that we get what is beneficial to us alone, it is a sacred trust to exercise that power on behalf of others.
The continuing disenfranchisement of the people of the District of Columbia is an egregious moral wrong that must be addressed by all members of the community of faith.