'The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time'

The pulpit at many black churches is a place to praise the Most High God -- and to promote the importance of higher learning. How California universities are targeting urban churches to reach future college students.

It was only logical for my student to conclude that society didn't expect much from him and his classmates. As a result, they didn't expect much from themselves.

How many eighth-grade Bible studies lead with Lamentations? Or Leviticus? Not many that I'm aware of.

Yet last I checked, Lamentations and Leviticus are part of the biblical canon, along with Romans and Revelation and lots of other heady reading material.

Should it matter to pastors, then, that the average graduate of America's city schools reads at an eighth-grade level and that many high school graduates don't even rank that high?

The most controversial "stay in school" speech in the history of America came and went today, and the general consensus is that our kids were not seriously injured by President Obama's words.

The state of Mississippi has a new civil and human rights curriculum for its public school students. It's the first of its kind in the nation. Not bad for a state that Martin Luther King Jr. once famously said was "sweltering with the heat of injustice."

Raising one half-African son and one of mixed European descent posed both ordinary and unique parenting challenges for my husband and me. What was best for one child was not necessarily best for the other. Often, competing concerns led to less than ideal decisions. This is true for all parents, but it is uniquely so for white parents raising children of a different race.

If you're a middle-class parent with a senior graduating from high school this year, you've probably been deeply involved in the frantic world of college acceptance. You've been sweating it out with your kid as he awaits that all-important letter from his school of choice. You've played the role of the patient counselor, but the truth is you're just as anxious as your young college-student-to-be.

Among the slew of articles and books written about Barack Obama over the last year, one of the most surprisingly controversial entries is a children's book -- Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, by poet Nikki Grimes and artist Bryan Collier. The book was released last summer and quickly landed on the bestseller list. But with that success also came criticism, as many readers and reviewers characterized the tome as hagiography and political propaganda. According to Grimes, who says she knew very little about Obama before writing the book, hero worship and politics were the furthest things from her mind.

George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, seems like an unlikely place for a racial incident: The small Christian college was founded by Quakers, who were active in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War and helped slaves escape along the Underground Railroad.

But last year, on Sept. 23, a university employee found a life-sized cardboard cutout of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama hanging from a tree on campus, with a sign attached to it that read: "Act Six reject." The phrase was a reference to a program by George Fox and Portland Central Young Life that offers full scholarships and leadership training to area high school students. Most, but not all, of the recipients are from minority groups.