Category: Discipleship
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Justice and Joy
This was first published in my newsletter earlier this year. In the days after Rep. John Lewis passed away, among the many tributes and remembrances, I stumbled onto this short video of the congressman dancing. He’s standing in what I assume were his offices when Pharrell Williams’ Happy begins playing. As people in the background…
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White fragility is spiritual immaturity
This was first published in my newsletter earlier this year. Here’s a confession: I haven’t read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Over the past couple of years, conversation partners have sometimes assumed that I’ve read it – You know, like how DiAngelo writes about white people in her book. – and I’ve generally just nodded…
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Why this time might be different.
I wrote this earlier this year for my newsletter. I spent this week with my family in Wisconsin, mostly unplugged. One afternoon we visited a small bookshop in downtown Woodstock, IL, just across the border. It was my first time in an independent book store since March and, despite masking-up before entering, it felt great…
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Can white Jesus be saved?
First posted to my newsletter which you can subscribe to here. This week, in my little corner of the Internet, some people were wringing their hands about white Jesus. As statues and monuments to the Confederacy are being torn down, some people have begun to wonder whether it’s time to remove representations of Jesus which…
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The (un)importance of cross-racial friendships
First posted to my newsletter which you can subscribe to here. This week, during an interview about Rediscipling the White Church, the conversation drifted into the role of relationships in the work for racial justice and reconciliation. It’s a tricky topic. As Emerson and Smith write about in Divided by Faith, relationalism is one of…
David W. Swanson 