Throwback Thursday - Episode 15: Thinking About Black Lives Matter (with Jemar Tisby)

This podcast with Jemar was originally published on the Eccleisam Journal's website on August 9th, 2016. The journal is now a closed project, but the time I spent with others writing articles and doing podcasts was fruitful for that season. One of these "long lost" episodes is worth re-posting in light of recent events. If we were going to have this podcast, again, both my co-host and I (Tim Woody) would probably ask better questions. We would try to not breathe too heavily into the microphone and we would try to smooth out other production errors! But by and large, we think this was and still is a beneficial conversation. No one needs to be told that the current Black Lives Matter marches are incredibly polarizing. I think at the time (2016) many people were still unsure of what to make of BLM and were hopeful it would be more malleable.  In general, it is still good to not embrace BLM (or any movement) uncritically while it is also good to not dismiss the heart cry of a desire for justice. A better impulse is to question which standard of justice we will use. That being said, I hope this old conversation can help spawn new ones as we think biblically about justice in our modern day. The paragraph below is a copy of the original preface to this episode.

NOTE: The Reformed African-American Network (RAAN) was later renamed The Witness. Since this originally appeared, Jemar has also written the book The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, a New York Times Bestselling book.

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Today, on the two-year anniversary of the Michael Brown shooting, we are joined by Jemar Tisby to discuss the ever-heated topic of Black Lives Matter. Jemar unpacks how to think biblically about BLM, what we should affim and what we should push back on as we critically engage this sensitive subject. Jemar is the president and co-founder of the Reformed African-American Network, co-host of the show "Pass the Mic," and a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Reformed Theological Seminary. He is a current PhD student in History at the University of Mississippi. You can follow him on twitter @JemarTisby, and you can visit the RAAN website by clicking below.