Life & Faith

What happens when religious language reckons with racial injustice.   “The original sin of this country still stains our nation today,” said Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden in the wake of the police killing, in May, of George Floyd. The phrase “America’s original sin is slavery” is so widely used in the United States that it is practically cliché. But what does it actually mean? “When you call something sinful, you’re speaking to a transcendent moral norm. As a person of faith, I think that what America does isn’t simply wrong to other human beings. It offends God himself,” says Esau McCaulley, an Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois, and the author of the forthcoming Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. In this episode of Life & Faith, we explore the crossover between the metaphor of ‘original sin’ in discussions of racial injustice and the Jewish and Christian idea of human brokenness found right at the beginning o