Childwatch Column

  • Gun Violence

    A Back to School Prayer

    This year, the first week of September was disrupted by a terrible tragedy that has become its own all-too-familiar routine in our nation: headlines about another school shooting.

    | National

  • Honoring Freedom Summer

    As summer draws to a close, we are also nearing the end of an extraordinary milestone – the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Summer.

    | National

  • Women Creating Change

    When a large meeting of Black women voters made headlines this week, to many people it was another reminder of the major role Black women and all women have always played in creating transforming change.

  • The Country We Need to Create

    At a moment of so much uncertainty over where our nation is headed and what national unity really means, I return again to the wise words of my late friend Dr. Vincent Harding, the revered historian, theologian, social justice activist, and visionary who never lost sight of the “beloved community” his dear colleague Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed our nation and world could become.

    | National

  • The Scratch Line

    My dear and much beloved preacher-teacher friend and spiritual mentor Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor was a great historically Black college president, a Peace Corps leader in Africa, and pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York.

  • “Dream and Labor”

    As our nation continues to mourn Rev. Lawson’s own death last month, his words are resonating deeply again right now. Rev. Lawson was honoring “the conscience of Congress” during another perilous political moment, and wanted to tell us what he believed our nation needed to do in order to move forward.

    | National