Ordinary people - churches, too - have a role to force politicians to respond. Governments are not impressed with theories, but governments are impressed with people who change their minds about things.

I think "post-racial" is a dangerous trap. You can fall into complacency and give your complicity a much more dangerous character.

Ubuntu is not a biblical concept but an ancient African one. Nevertheless it falls back on one simple thing: that humans have been created for togetherness, and what drives us apart is greed, lust for power, and a sense of exclusion, but those are aberrations.

I believe scripture is not just resilient but rebellious against its abuse by people. Scripture says it refuses to be used in that way for long. That is why the gospel that has been used by the oppressors is the same gospel that liberated the oppressed: They were reading the same book. Something in the DNA of Christian faith and in the Bible agitates against that kind of misuse.

The fundamentalists may have created a personalized Jesus we don't even recognize, but the liberals' Jesus, too, is an individualized Jesus who serves the empire - a Jesus painfully divorced from his ministry of justice.

What always strikes me in the story of Cain and Abel is how often the word "brother" is used. Cain killed his "brother." God says it was "the blood of your brother." The killing was done to another human being, a child of God like you, breaking that sacred bond of common humanity.

Ordinary people - churches, too - have a role to force politicians to respond. Governments are not impressed with theories, but governments are impressed with people who change their minds about things.