During the 1850s, arguments raged over the morality of slave-holding, and the exegesis of Scripture played a key role in those debates. The exegetical battles were one-sided: all abolitionists could point to was Galatians 3:28 and the Letter of Philemon, while slave owners had the rest of the Old and New Testaments, which gave every […]

Two things I have learned from reading Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, the two U of Alabama professors who have written seminal books on CRT: One, they deny the genetic basis of race. The old paradigm that the world is populated by 5 large race classes is too simplistic, according to them. I tend to […]

No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement. Shelby Steele Shelby Steel talks about “disassociation,” an action taken by whites to demonstrate they are not racist. Corporations disassociate by submitting their employees to long indoctrination […]

Now that  Gone with the Wind  has been taken out of HBO’s lineup for the addition of salubrious context, I commend The Sun Shines Bright, circa nineteen fifty-three–that is, if you’d like to see Hollywood at its most politically incorrect, on one hand, and it’s most heartfelt poignant, on the other. John Ford claimed it […]

To explain the complex, finely tuned relationship between blacks and whites in the south is beyond the power of human language and far too elusive for the clumsy antiseptic tools of modern social science or the mercenary cliches of the media. Such an explanation would have to include the the panorama of an entire civilization […]

Barefoot and swatting gnats and flies that swarm around the open sore on his forearm, he’s leaning against a pine tree by the tracks, waiting with the others. When he left home, back in Emanuel County, his pappy gave him his old cap lock musket, but he hadn’t fired it much because he was skinny […]

Watching some fine old westerns. Check out The Furies (a play on the Greek spirits of revenge) with Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston, black and white, Anthony Newman directed. An epic depiction of a father daughter relationship with hints of Antigone and Creon on a  sweeping scale, all played out in the Arizona cattle country […]

Just read Brian Doyle’s Mink River, a fresh, Joyecean immersion in the mythic and green world of the northwest coast, complete with native American lore,  a man who lost his skin and had to be sewn back in it, crows that speak wisely, and a man who feels acutely the pain of others, even from […]

1962, Detroit: Ralph, Age 18, Clerk at the 7/11 My daddy was a cheater, a dead-eye deleter, his gut giggly ruse: light the two minute fuse that Hiroshimaed momma into twenty tiny atolls of mammalian animosity. His days: beer, bull and baseball stats in Speedy’s body shop, welders and sweltering Lucky Strike-a-fied air. His nights […]

Ezekiel 18:8 condemns the man who lends and demands interest. In fact, according to the prophet, the man who does so should be put to death. Not prison. Not exile. Death. And a similar condemnation of usury echoes throughout scripture: . 1.  1 Timothy 6:17-19 Command those who are rich in this world’s goods not to […]