EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

As history is being made with Kamala Harris becoming the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States, the essay featured in this issue sounds an alarm calling attention to what is, in the eyes of many, the country’s deep need for change. The upcoming presidential election may be viewed as a reflection of United States standing at the precipice of giving-in to two seemingly eternal challenges to the nation’s identity—whether to affirm or deny the principle of impartiality regarding the nation’s citizenry, and whether to affirm or deny the inclination to centralize lucre and what it can garner as the central meaning of life. These challenges, on one hand, in the case of the former, present the choice between the nation seeking a trajectory of affirming and bridging its diversity, or the nation perpetuating the path that produced American diversity through the apparent trenchant efforts to erase indigenous populations while instituting subjugation of persons as a normative element in society. In the case of the latter of the two challenges, on the other hand, the nation is faced with leaning fully in the direction of rending the community into a certainty of those who count as persons and citizens and those who do not, with the non-persons/non-citizens sentenced to be a part of the persistent and ongoing commerce-laden devastations of the environment and nature, or moving in the direction of centralizing regard for all persons and regard for the natural world among the society’s shared values.

In a tribute to the memory and work of theologian Delores S. Williams, Jean Derricotte-Murphy calls attention to Williams’ powerful insights about post-Civil Rights Era discursive and political regressions. Joining the chorus of scholars affirming the significance of Williams’ work—including the 2004 Union Seminary Quarterly Review festschrift-style collection of essays—Murphy identifies Williams as a prophetic voice that recognized movement toward the hardened social cleavages and resulting violences the country is experiencing today. By integrating analysis of Williams’ observations with examples of current hate speech, social hazing, Black deaths, anti-“other” rhetoric, exclusionary political policies, and more, Murphy reminds readers of an important emphasis in Williams’ work while lamenting the state of the nation. Murphy quotes and joins Williams in specifically asking Christians in the United States, “If the gospel has no power to conquer the sin of racism, what meaning and value does it have at all?” In view of the seemingly hardened social and political oppositions, it is a question that implies and echoes the query in the title Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 book: Where do we go from here? Chaos or community?

Rosetta E. Ross