Category: Chicago
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Where Was the White Church?
A lightly edited version of a talk I gave at a conference at Progressive Baptist Church here in Chicago. On a November Sunday in 1898, the Rev. Francis J. Grimke stood before his congregation at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington D. C. Rev. Grimke had been born into slavery in South Carolina, the…
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Local Countercultures of Reconciliation and Justice
This was first published in my newsletter earlier this year. I’ve recently been listening to “Motive”, a podcast produced by our local NPR station about the rise of of neo-Nazi skinheads in Chicago and beyond in the 1980’s. It’s pretty troubling stuff, as you can imagine, and it’s hard not to make connections to the…
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The Truth of the Protest
This was first published in my newsletter earlier this year. Why is it that you can know how terribly something will turn out and still be devastated when it does? This is what I was wondering on Wednesday afternoon after the grand jury declined to indict anyone for Breonna Taylor’s killing. When I read about…
David W. Swanson 