Below is a recording of a sermon I preached this past Sunday at Prairie Presbyterian Church. My text was John 3:1-21. As I was working on the sermon, I began to notice interesting connections between the story of Nicodemus’s encounter with Jesus and our current cultural struggles surrounding race in North America. The fact that I’ve been reading Jonathan Tran’s insightful book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, is also surely a contributing factor. The first part of the sermon is sure to aggravate cultural warriors on the left and the right, but I do think the second half gestures towards a more distinctive Christian approach to this set of problems. Continue reading A Sermon for Black History Month
Tag Archives: identity politics
A Voice of Sanity
I’ve just ordered Jonathan Tran’s new book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism after listening to a conversation between him and the guys at the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast. I’ve appreciated Tran’s past work (particularly The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory) and there is an essay co-authored by Tran and Hauerwas in Minding the Web, but I was especially struck in this conversation by how Tran is providing a much needed theological voice of sanity in the midst of contemporary struggles surrounding race. Continue reading A Voice of Sanity