Commentary
In Honor of MLK: East to West is Best
I won’t presume to know why, 50 years after his death, we haven’t named a street after Martin Luther King Jr. in Kansas City, Missouri. Despite its broad support across ethnic lines, former Mayors Ilus Davis, Charles Wheeler, Dick Berkley, Emanuel Cleaver, Kay Barnes and Mark Funkhouser haven’t been able to do it. Recently, the…
Read MoreCourt Experience Exposes Anti-Islam Sham
In 2012, Kansas passed a law forbidding courts in the state from making any ruling based on foreign law. Critics widely — and accurately — viewed it as the product of a campaign by anti-Islam bigots who were hyperventilating about Shari’a, sometimes called Islamic canonical law. Those bigots spread the alarm that Shari’a would replace…
Read MoreBet You Didn’t Know ‘Amazing’ Religious Archive is So Close To KC
You may be surprised to learn that the first King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, came in “he” and “she” editions. No, one wasn’t for males and one for females. Rather, in the book of Ruth, one translation said “he went into the city” in verse 15 of chapter three, and one…
Read MoreHistoric Site Gets Some Comic Relief
As attendance at religious services declines nationwide, houses of worship are getting repurposed, including an old brick church just east of 199th and Metcalf in southern Johnson County, on four-block-long Park Street. Calvin Coolidge is loving it back to life. No, not that Coolidge. Rather, his distant cousin, the Kansas City singer and comic. When…
Read MoreKC Pastors Recall Tense Days After MLK Assassination
When Kansas City exploded in fury and literal fire after the April 4, 1968, assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., area clergy worked to restore calm and then insist that the community work to remove the underlying causes of the rage. It was important — at times dangerous — work that helped shape…
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