Anthea Butler

While the 1963 Birmingham church bombing is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings in the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11, 2001.

Graham functioned as a megaphone for conservative biblical ideas that dovetailed with conservative politics, including family, sexual morality, and adherence to laws. He was not only an evangelist, he was also an enforcer: enforcing conservative white Christian social beliefs and evangelical ethical claims as 'America's Pastor.'

Graham promoted a white evangelical respectability that wanted to 'put the brakes' on the civil rights movement, and never really accepted women as equal to men. He may have been the country's greatest evangelist, but he was also an apologist for the racist and sexist beliefs pervasive among white evangelical men in 20th-century America.

Incidents of racial bias and implicit bias happen to African-Americans of every social class daily in America. White people seldom notice or dwell on these as they encounter the quotidian events of their day.

Spatial racism, the erasure of black faces in a predominantly white city, is in full effect in both Crown Heights and Center City Philadelphia. This racism demands that bodies that don't conform to a mandated 'white' status quo can be redlined out of a space.

In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.

The survivors of Hurricane Harvey do not need empty tweets and platitudes from people like Donald Trump and Joel Osteen. They have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as we say in Texas, they are all hat and no cattle.

Mr. Trump's and Mr. Osteen's brands are rooted in success, not Scripture. Believers in prosperity like winners. Hurricanes and catastrophic floods do not provide the winning narratives crucial to keep adherents chained to prosperity gospel thinking. That is why it is easy for both men to issue platitudes devoid of empathy during natural disasters.

Natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey are the worst kind of crises for people like Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen, who purvey their own versions of the prosperity gospel. This is a belief that says if you think positively and make affirmations, God will reward you with financial success and good health.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen are mirrors of each other. Both enjoy enormous support among evangelicals, yet they lack a command of biblical scripture. Both are among the 1 percent.

The Charleston shooting is a result of an ingrained culture of racism and a history of terrorism in America. It should be covered as such.

Graham may have wanted integration, but instead, he promoted gradualism and provided absolution for racists hiding behind a Christianity attuned not only to Jesus but also focused on regulating behavior and black bodies.

The shooter's choice of Emanuel AME was most likely deliberate, given the church's storied history. It was the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South, founded in 1818 by a group of men including Morris Brown, a prominent pastor, and Denmark Vesey, who would go on to lead a large, yet failed, slave revolt in Charleston.

Bernice King, daughter of MLK, is an assistant pastor at New Birth.

The prosperity gospel and its purveyors are worldwide and account for the rapid growth of Pentecostalism, the global religious movement prosperity preachers come from.

There is not one particular moment that can account for the shift from the social issue concerns of 19th-century evangelicals into the state of American evangelicalism today. Some historical moments are telling. The rise of biblical criticism in the 19th century forced evangelicals to make choices about what they believed about the gospel.

The 'teavangelicals' of the 21st century have flipped the script, turning their ideas about Christianity, social responsibility, and care for the downtrodden into a mythology of Christian founding fathers.

These 21st-century 'teavangelicals,' who represent a considerable segment of the Republican party, are vastly different from their 19th-century forebears. Nineteenth-century evangelicals were concerned with societal ills such as temperance, slavery, the rise of industrialisation and suffrage.

Charles Finney, the great 19th-century revivalist and evangelical, would have had a hard time preaching a revival in America today. Finney's brand of evangelical fervour, called the 'new measures,' emphasised saving souls and reviving worship by incorporating elements of personal testimony and music into church services.

Not every conservative Christian is a dominionist, but to say a movement doesn't exist, as some pundits and journalists have, without even being able to say what it is in an op-ed is just irresponsible... The big story is that the religious right isn't dead.

In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, but you have a favourite pastor or evangelist that you listen to occasionally. Studying scripture means you don't just read the Bible: you read devotional books and books designed to help your spiritual walk or the church broadly construed.

One of the first books that outlined spiritual mapping was 'Breaking Strongholds in Your City: How to Use Spiritual Mapping to Make your Prayers More Strategic, Effective and Targeted,' published in 1993.

Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.

If there is anyone who values free speech, it is a tenured professor!

My memories of Vatican II center on white parishioners turning away from me when I went to shake their hands at Mass during the sign of peace.

I went to Catholic school and experienced racism firsthand from nuns and priests.

Despite a rich history of black Americans involved in the Catholic Church, invisibility is a big problem for black Catholics in America.

For black Catholics, the papal visit is a time of anticipation but also a time of reflection on their difficult - but important - place within the Catholic Church in America.

Judges can bring their own biases about sexuality in the courtroom, causing victims untold pain in the telling and retailing of their stories.

What often happens in a court of law is that, if victims do get their day in court, they are on trial as much as the perpetrators.

Judge Aquilina did what Michigan State University officials, USA Gymnastics, and the Karoyli ranch officials did not: Immediately believed the women who had been abused, validated their lives, and ended their perpetrator's access to them and other victims.

If you're a black woman at an Ivy League school, there is no free speech for me because they're already pissed that I'm there.

While it is important that black women begin to receive the accolades and assistance they are due from the Democratic Party, they cannot be expected to continue to save white people from the poor choices they make - based not on moral values but party affiliation.

C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran professor of church growth at Fuller. He was considered to be the heir of McGavran, founder of the church growth movement. That movement essentially said, 'Whatever grows a church is good' and needs to be nurtured.

Black women care deeply about civic engagement, democracy, education, children, and justice.

What's sometimes called the 'browning' of the American Catholic church is very much on the minds of many U.S. bishops - and the pope. Unlike evangelicals who have stayed strong in their support of President Trump, the USCCB knows that it cannot afford to lose their Hispanic and African American population because of a weak stance on racism.

The American Catholic Church made statements on racism as far back as the 1940s and '50s. 'Colored' Catholic girls could not live in the dorms at Catholic University - the bishops' university - up into the 1940s.

Many Catholic parishes were segregated prior to the Civil Rights movement, and the first large contingent of African-American Catholic priests would enter into the seminary in the 1920s.

There are many photos of Catholic priests and nuns marching in the Civil Rights movement, most notably at the March on Selma, Ala. in 1965. However, the history of Catholicism in this country tells a different story.

When the good Christians of America are some of its biggest racists, one has to consider our moral responsibility to call out those who clearly are not for human flourishing, no matter what ethnicity a person is. Where are you on that scale? I know where I am.

As a historian of American and African-American religion, I know that the Trayvon Martin moment is just one moment in a history of racism in America that, in large part, has its underpinnings in Christianity and its history. Those of us who teach American Religion have a responsibility to tell all of the story, not just the nice touchy-feely parts.

As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain't my god.

God ain't good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us.

Graham's legacy is not as a maverick or a trailblazer. It is the legacy of a man who used Jesus as a tool to placate the masses so that the status quo of conservative white America could remain firmly in place.

Trump, despite his shallow depth of biblical knowledge, plays into both the apocalyptic end-time fears of evangelicals and their nostalgia for a 'small town' America.

Trump's defense of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism is gathering those who support him into a strong solidified base. Since the election of Francis, Republicans have been very wary of the Pope, attacking his liberal statements on homosexuality, global warming, and capitalism.

Protestants attacked Catholics during the 1844 Nativist riots in Philadelphia. Guess what that was about? Anti-immigrant sentiment. Back then, it was the influx of Irish Catholics into the city. Now, it's Donald Trump clinging to a bygone notion of Protestant ascendancy and nativist sentiments, when mainline Protestantism is on the wane in the U.S.

The usual Republican suspects lined up to side with Trump, chastizing Pope Francis for insinuating that the candidate isn't Christian.

'Amoris Latetia' reiterates that Pope Francis is interested in changing both the tone and reception of people and families in the church to a more hospitable, less judgmental environment.

Pope Francis is calling for a better way to hold together complicated family lives in the midst of official church teaching without alienating people who have marital issues and family problems.