America's problem with race has deep roots, with the country's foundation tied to the near extermination of one race of people and the enslavement of another. Racism is truly our nation's original sin. "It's time we right this unacceptable wrong," says bestselling author and leading Christian activist Jim Wallis. Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism to be taboo. His participation in the civil rights movement brought him back when he discovered a faith that commands racial justice. Yet as recent tragedies confirm, we continue to suffer from the legacy of racism. The old patterns of white privilege are colliding with the changing demographics of a diverse nation. The church has been slow to respond, and Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week. In America's Original Sin, Wallis offers a prophetic and deeply personal call to action in overcoming the racism so ingrained in American society. He speaks candidly to Christians--particularly white Christians--urging them to cross a new bridge toward racial justice and healing. Whenever divided cultures and gridlocked power structures fail to end systemic sin, faith communities can help lead the way to grassroots change. Probing yet positive, biblically rooted yet highly practical, this book shows people of faith how they can work together to overcome the embedded racism in America, galvanizing a movement to cross the bridge to a multiracial church and a new America.

The first book to explicitly name white supremacy as the motivation for Lincoln's assassination, America's Original Sin is an important and eloquent look at one of the most notorious episodes in American history.

Recollecting America's Original Sin: A Pilgrimage of Race and Grace journeys into anti-black racism throughout US history through a Christian spirituality lens. The reflections are fashioned as a spiritual pilgrimage that integrates listening, reflecting, and daily living. It recollects the nation’s freedom struggles around race, our original sin, which constrains and stains us now as ever. Walking a holy road of past, present, and future meaning, the chapters interlace historical moments and places into a web of provocative concerns. Anyone desiring to respond faithfully to the justice reckonings now seizing our country will travel the race-and-grace journey in these pages.

The landmark story of how interracial love and marriage changed American history—and continues to alter the landscape of American politics When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism. Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America’s original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of nonwhite blood merited exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday and is reinforced by today’s power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good. Not just a hopeful treatise on the future of race relations in America, Loving challenges the notion that trickle-down progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in artificial color blindness but in a culture where acceptance and difference are celebrated.

How interactions of race and religion have influenced unity and division in the church At the center of the story of American Christianity lies an integral connection between race relations and Christian unity. Despite claims that Jesus Christ transcends all racial barriers, the most segregated hour in America is still Sunday mornings when Christians gather for worship. In Slavery’s Long Shadow fourteen historians and other scholars examine how the sobering historical realities of race relations and Christianity have created both unity and division within American churches from the 1790s into the twenty-first century. The book’s three sections offer readers three different entry points into the conversation: major historical periods, case studies, and ways forward. Historians as well as Christians interested in racial reconciliation will find in this book both help for understanding the problem and hope for building a better future. Contributors: Tanya Smith Brice Joel A. Brown Lawrence A. Q. Burnley Jeff W. Childers Wes Crawford James L. Gorman Richard T. Hughes Loretta Hunnicutt Christopher R. Hutson Kathy Pulley Edward J. Robinson Kamilah Hall Sharp Jerry Taylor D. Newell Williams

To Make Their Own Way in the World is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the early history of photography. The fifteen daguerreotypes--made in 1850 by photographer Joseph T. Zealy--portray Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty, men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Since 1976, when the daguerreotypes were rediscovered at Harvard University's Peabody Museum, the photographs have been the subject of intense and widespread study. To Make Their Own Way in the World features essays by prominent scholars who explore everything from the photographs' historical context and the "science" of race to the ways in which photography created a visual narrative of slavery and its effects. Multidisciplinary, deeply collaborative, and with more than two hundred illustrations, including new photography by contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent contemporary inquiry. Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Travels with George . . . is quintessential Philbrick—a lively, courageous, and masterful achievement.” —The Boston Globe Does George Washington still matter? Bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick argues for Washington’s unique contribution to the forging of America by retracing his journey as a new president through all thirteen former colonies, which were now an unsure nation. Travels with George marks a new first-person voice for Philbrick, weaving history and personal reflection into a single narrative. When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing—Americans. In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick follows Washington’s presidential excursions: from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York; a monthlong tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; a venture onto Long Island and eventually across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington’s and Philbrick’s eyes. Written at a moment when America’s founding figures are under increasing scrutiny, Travels with George grapples bluntly and honestly with Washington’s legacy as a man of the people, a reluctant president, and a plantation owner who held people in slavery. At historic houses and landmarks, Philbrick reports on the reinterpretations at work as he meets reenactors, tour guides, and other keepers of history’s flame. He paints a picture of eighteenth-century America as divided and fraught as it is today, and he comes to understand how Washington compelled, enticed, stood up to, and listened to the many different people he met along the way—and how his all-consuming belief in the union helped to forge a nation.

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

"The founder and CEO of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and columnist for the Atlantic describes how white Protestant Christians have declined in influence and power since the 1990s and explores the effect this has had on America, "--NoveList.

“A hard-hitting sermon on the racial divide, directed specifically to a white congregation.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Bestseller As the country grapples with racial division at a level not seen since the 1960s, Michael Eric Dyson’s voice is heard above the rest. In Tears We Cannot Stop, a provocative and deeply personal call or change, Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress, we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how Black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, and discounted. In the tradition of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time—short, emotional, literary, powerful—this is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations need to read. Praise for Tears We Cannot Stop Named a Best/Most Anticipated Book of 2017 by: The Washington Post • Bustle • Men’s Journal • The Chicago Reader • StarTribune • Blavity• The Guardian • NBC New York’s Bill’s Books • Kirkus Reviews • Essence “Elegantly written and powerful in several areas: moving personal recollections; profound cultural analysis; and guidance for moral redemption. A work to relish.” —Toni Morrison “Here’s a sermon that’s as fierce as it is lucid . . . If you’re black, you’ll feel a spark of recognition in every paragraph. If you’re white, Dyson tells you what you need to know—what this white man needed to know, at least. This is a major achievement. I read it and said amen.” —Stephen King “One of the most frank and searing discussions on race . . . a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and King’s Why We Can’t Wait.” —The New York Times Book Review