Between the Trees

Sorry for the bombarding with new posts on race in the past few days, I’ve just spent a lot of time thinking through it and I want to offer a thought I’ve been having a lot the past few days.
There’s two comments I keep coming across and I think they’re both betraying an implicit assumption [...]

A medical mission team just left from Grace Chapel this morning. Eric and I are good friends with several of the team members.
Well, while they were in route, a school in Port-au-Prince collapsed. Please pray for the people of Port-au-Prince and for the team while they’re done there this week.

UPDATE: The always-excellent Leonard Pitts has a great column discussing race and the 2008 campaign here.
I’ve read comments by several conservatives bemoaning the fact that so many African Americans seem to have voted for Obama primarily for race-related reasons. I could write a scathing 800 word column denouncing these attitudes as both profoundly insensitive and [...]

Yes, I’m trying to be provocative with the title, but the idea comes from a quote in Thomas Oden’s book, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind.
“These [the idea that most northern developments in the Christian mind were brought about by African thought] are bold assertions. They remain to many European intellectuals largely ignorable. They are [...]

I was spending some time reading/praying about a girl burned alive for her faith recently in Saudi Arabia (HT: TSK). I’m curious: do you guys pray for the persecuted church? If so, what do you pray? What about financial help - do any of you support charities to help the persecuted church?
I’d be interested to [...]

My pastor, Mike Hsu, has been posting updates on the situation in Haiti after Gustav, Hanna, and Ike. Keep praying for them.
Right now, all monetary gifts they receive are treated as emergency gifts, which means all the money goes to buy food and water to take to Gonaives, which is the region most affected by [...]

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa died earlier today in a Paris hospital.
Nikolas Sarkozy may have said it best, “[Mwanawasa's death] is a great loss for the Zambian people who respected and had great affection for him. It’s a great loss for the African continent as a whole, which appreciated his political courage. It’s a big loss [...]

A little over a month ago I posted about the ongoing health problems of Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa. I spent most of last summer in Zambia and so it’s a nation very close to my heart and reading about Mwanwasa’s health problems has really caused me to worry about the nation’s future. Mwanawasa is one [...]

Today marks the 90th birthday of Madiba, Nelson Mandela. (Madiba is an honorary title conferred upon him by South Africans.)
Most recently, he has been in the news for issuing a call to fight global poverty and his condemnation of Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe.
If you’ve not read up on Mandela’s life-story, you really must because [...]

Any category besides “neighbor” and “brother” we use to identify others is inherently dangerous. It tempts us to subsume the biblical unifying characterizations of people - born of Adam, born of Christ - with unbiblical ones. And the fact is, almost all of these unbiblical categories were primarily created so that humans could excuse evil. [...]