The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope

  THESE PEOPLE INVITED MIKE HUCKABEE TO “RE-ASSASSINATE” DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ON HIS HOLIDAY ©Wendell Griffen, 2022   The Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, an agency within the Arkansas Department of Education, invited Mike Huckabee to deliver a “keynote address” during an invitation only “interfaith prayer breakfast” that will be hosted at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion by Governor Asa Hutchinson at an undisclosed time on Monday, January 17, 2022, the federal holiday established to honor King’s life and ministry. I have called the Huckabee invitation another example of how people, including political and religious figures, are “re-assassinating” Martin Luther King Jr.   Mike Huckabee served as governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007. He came in second (behind former Senator John McCain) in the 2008 campaign for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States and was unable to win the nomination in 2016. He is host of the Hucka...

  THE RE-ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ©Wendell Griffen, 2022   This year, the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, an agency of the Arkansas Department of Education, has invited an un-reconstructed Southern Baptist preacher, right wing politician, and Fox News pundit named Mike Huckabee to deliver a "keynote address" during what it terms an "inter-faith prayer breakfast" on the King holiday (January 17). Attendance will be by invitation only. The event will be held at the Arkansas Governor's Mansion ( https://arkingdream.org/events) .  A year to the day before he was assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, publicly defined the war in Vietnam as a civil rights issue on April 4, 1967, in an address titled Beyond Vietnam:   A Time to Break Silence to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City.   In doing so, King uttered the following prescient statement.   The war in Vi...

  WHITE SUPREMACISTS ARE HELL BENT ON REPEATING HISTORY ©Wendell Griffen, 2021     Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global recently wrote an article reporting on the defeat of a Black pastor who had served for 17 years on a public-school board in Houston, Texas. The defeat was orchestrated by right-wing white parents opposed to critical race theory and intersectionality (although there is no evidence that public high schools are teaching critical race theory and intersectionality).   https://baptistnews.com/article/houston-pastor-voted-off-local-school-board-by-angry-parents-who-called-him-a-black-liberal-racist/#.YbsqHGjMK8U   We have not seen the end of the behavior Mark Wingfield reported about. Sadly, many white right-wing opponents to public education claim to be followers of Jesus.   Nicholas Clairmont said that “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” That quote is most likely borrowed from writer and phil...

  VACCINATION OR NOT – LEGAL AND RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES ©Wendell Griffen, 2021 University of Pretoria, South Africa September 20, 2021               Two years ago, the term Covid-19 was not part of our vocabulary. Most people would have stumbled in speaking the term “novel coronavirus.”   The world had survived bouts with influenza and Ebola virus in prior years. But infectious disease experts, public health officials, physicians, politicians, lawyers, judges, courts, journalists, and everyone else in the world did not know about Covid-19. It did not exist in September 2019.   Two years later, Covid-19 defines how we live, move, work, study, worship, entertain, and conduct the other rituals of existence from birth thru death. What began as a new viral infection in one province in China, spread across that nation, spanned the world in a matter of weeks, and made globalism real in new ways.   Sc...