My recent blog, “No healing without truth,” has sparked some challenging conversations. A respected African American colleague, Rev. Paige Chargois, while agreeing wholeheartedly on the need for truth, writes, “Black folks have not been avoiding the truth. Quite the contrary! Black folks have been living that, writing that, teaching that, even adjudicating that for centuries!” She says that the real […]

On January 6, a white mob assaulted the US Capitol. “Hang Mike Pence!” they shouted as they forced their way into the Chambers. Some carried assault rifles and Confederate flags. Others brought explosives. One man had texted he was thinking of “putting a bullet” in Nancy Pelosi. There was no doubt about the intent of the ringleaders. They were hoping […]

It is becoming increasingly evident that trust is an essential moral foundation for the functioning of democracy. The greatest challenges in our communities, our countries and the world today are not intellectual, or technical, or even economic. They are problems of lack of trust. But what is trust? Most of us have an implicit understanding, but its multidimensional nature makes […]

“Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.” This is how David Brooks concludes a recent column in the New York Times. He surveys the threat to democracy presented by the refusal among large sections of the US population to accept reality and to trust proven data. He notes that social media are accelerants of paranoia by spreading misinformation, […]

History turns on small hinges. We may look back at the question posed by a 76-year-old African American woman as a key factor that made Joe Biden’s presidency possible. At a time when his primary campaign was floundering, Jannie Jones, a church usher beckoned to Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina and whispered, “I need to know who you’re going […]

“America is at a crossroads. One road leads to community, the other to the chaos of competing identities and interests.” These words, inspired by the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., are the opening sentences of A Call to Community, a manifesto for honest conversation about race that Hope in the Cities and its national partners launched in May, 1996 […]

My father-in-law, Alan Thornhill was an Anglican priest and playwright. My wife has been editing a book of reflections drawn from some of his sermons at the small country church in England which he served in retirement. In one of them he highlights three vital ingredients for a growing faith: air, food and exercise. We breath in and out as we […]

Gerald Henderson was not the most obvious person to lead a movement for truth-telling and racial healing. An Englishman, he was the product, as he put it, of a “white, privileged, middle class, private school background.”  Yet he was to become the trusted confidante of people of all races and classes in his adopted hometown of Liverpool, and he played […]

(I first posted this in August 2014 but current events in the US and international protests against police and government violence make it even more relevant.) In May of this year I was called for jury duty. Every Wednesday for a month I joined more than 100 other Richmonders of all backgrounds at the John Marshall courthouse. For hours we […]

We now have four granddaughters. The older two are eight and seven. The younger two were born during the Covid crisis, just five and three months ago. For the older two, much of the conversation centers on questions about the opening of the school year. But all of them are fortunate to have comfortable homes and parents with secure jobs […]