President Donald Trump, right, bows his head as Relentless Church Pastor John Gray, left, says a prayer during a meeting with inner city pastors in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2018. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) On Wednesday, August 1, President Donald Trump met with prominent black clergy at the […]
Read more "Don’t Sit, Stand"In a moment of unscripted ecstasy, during a recording for jazz and gospel artist Damien Sneed, Bishop Iona Locke illuminated that “under a dark canopy” many self-identifying Christians show up to places hiding what she calls the “introspect.” The introspect for Locke could easily be interpreted as what’s quintessentially known as church hurt. For the […]
Read more "Under a Dark Canopy: Dealing With #ChurchHurt"Netflix recently released “Come Sunday,” a movie that told the story of Carlton Pearson. The story dramatized Pearson’s move from classic Pentecostalism to Christian universalism, approximately collapsing the years 1998 to 2006 into a movie format. The movie stars Chiwetel Ojiofor as Pearson and Martin Sheen as Oral Roberts, along with roles played by Danny […]
Read more "“Come Sunday”: An Explainer Essay"Earlier this fall, there was an infamous photo of some well-known prominent (TV) pastors that were seen praying with (or for) GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. It was one of those moments that made the rounds of a short-lived news cycle on September 29 of this year. Pastors Paula White, Kenneth Copeland, David Jeremiah […]
Read more "The Day the Black Church Circus Came to Town"By all accounts, new ground was broken last night when it came to the public discourse of the intersection of the hip hop community and that of the LBGTQ community. More specifically, the black LGBTQ community. Following the season four premier of Love and Hip Hop on Viacom owned station VH1, an hour-long round-table discussion called […]
Read more "Conversating, When Conversation Goes Wrong: VH1, Hip Hop and Jamal Bryant"Let me put a clear disclaimer before I launch into the deep with this blog post: The institutional Black Church as we know it, something that is a proper noun, has entered it’s final stages of life. The metonymical phrase “the Black Church” is rather black churches that have a different socio-economic and political outlook […]
Read more "It’s a Democracy, Not a Theocracy: How The Black Church Gets it Wrong"On February 18, 2012, the family of Whitney Houston paid their final respects in an invite only, yet televised homegoing service at her home church, New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey. Initial reports had said that only BET was covering the full service, but certainly shocking to me, the major cable news networks […]
Read more "The Black Church, Homegoing Services and Whitney Houston"I know that’s a long title and certainly hyperbolic, but I think it addresses the gutted and eviscerated feeling that I experienced watching CNN’s Soledad O’Brien “Almighty Debt” a Black In America special. Granted I went into this third installment of the Black In America series with some serious preconceived notions. Rightly so I believe. […]
Read more "For Colored Persons Who Have Considered Suicide When Being “Black In America” Is Enough: An Uppity Negro Response to CNN’s Black In America III"We’ve all had that moment when we realize that a conversation somehow strayed down a rabbit-hole and turned into a debate, and that debate got intense and turned into an argument. Somewhere deep down inside you were maintaining your cool when all of a sudden the other Negro made it personal and said something about […]
Read more "“Don’t Talk About My Mama!” and Other Problems With Black Intellectual Rhetoric"Hot off the press from tonight, the latest in news to affect the institutional Black Church, both old and new, has been the lawsuit against Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church of Lithonia, Georgia. This seems to be yet another brick chipped away in already bruised and battered institutional Black Church. […]
Read more "And The Walls Come Tumba’ling Down: The Religious Politics of Eddie Long"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 