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. Anthea Butler Read Quote
Black women care deeply about civic engagement, democracy, education, children, and justice. Anthea Butler Read Quote
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. Anthea Butler Read Quote
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. Anthea Butler Read Quote
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. Anthea Butler Read Quote
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. Anthea Butler Read Quote
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. Anthea Butler Read Quote
The decision to allow clergy to perform same-sex marriages at the discretion of the congregation poses challenges for seminaries training new pastors who come from denominations fundamentally opposed on biblical grounds to same-sex marriage. Anthea Butler Read Quote
The text, ‘Is God a White Racist’, By Rev. Dr. William Jones, is still studied by theologians and academics and taught in institutes of higher learning. The book called into question the chief construction of black liberation theology: that God is on the side of the oppressed. Anthea Butler Read Quote
What is the role of a public intellectual in the age of Twitter and soundbites? Is it to share your thoughts for the public good, or is it to curate the heaps of hate emails, tweets, and right-wing articles that trash your intellectual and social work? Anthea Butler Read Quote
