The Reverends Emmett G. Price III and Irene Monroe joined Boston Public Radio for their regular Monday segment, "All Revved Up." Price and Monroe talked about the shooting of police in Ferguson, Missouri, the Northeastern University men's basketball team making it into the NCAA tournament, a high-flying minister who crowd-sourced a jet purchase, and missteps by the Vatican Cultural Office.
Rev. Emmett Price is a music professor at Northeastern University, and the author of The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture. Irene Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist who writes for Huffington Post and Bay Windows, among other publications. All questions below are paraphrased, and answers edited where indicated [...].
Jeffrey Williams has been arrested and charged in the shooting of two Ferguson, Missouri police officers. What do you make of this new development?
Price: There's a number of conflating issues here. [It was assumed] the shooter was embedded in the protests. [...] Jeffrey Williams suggests that he was actually participating in the protests earlier in the evening [...] and was aiming to shoot somebody else and shot these police officers.
Monroe: One bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch. I see this as a diversion topic. [...] The Mayor needs to go. It really bothers me that he says even in the face of what [US Attorney General] Eric Holder's report disclosed that there isn't a race problem in Ferguson. So you wonder now, where has he been? [...] I was surprised that the police force didn't go into receivership. [...] You're getting the same people who caused the demise to fix it.
Price: As we look towards this conversation on race, the conversation is really about how we get rid of these presumptions and assumptions of black people. [...] The assumption is, 'one of these black people' [...] is the one who shot these police officers.
Monroe: It's sort of like, if you're black, no matter what you do — unless you're [Pres.] Obama — you're representing the race. So you have that problem. [...] "Black Lives Matter" seemed to be a type of movement that a COINTELPRO operation would find itself embedded in.
Switching gears — Rev. Price, you're a professor at Northeastern, presumably a big fan of their teams. What do you think of their birth in the 2015 NCAA basketball tournament?
Price: I think we'll send the podcast from today's program to Coach Bill Cohen. [The team is made up of] fine ball players. I've had many of them as my students. [...] We're going to take Notre Dame down!
The New York Times has a piece by Brendan Prunty that says some preachers are eschewing Sunday service in favor of ministering to college teams, especially in the Big East conference.
Monroe: [They make] more money than they could possibly get from their coffers on Sunday morning. [I call this] 'muscular Christianity.' We must remember that a Presbyterian minister invented basketball! [...] Also, when I think of the YMCA, [...] that's also a kind of "muscular Christianity."
It came out through the reporting of Kirsten West Savali over at The Root that Atlanta mega-church pastor Creflo Dollar is asking his congregation to purchase a $65 million jet for him. What?
Price: Theologically I don't subscribe to this strand of [...] 'prosperity theology.' [...] I remember the '70s movie Car Wash. In Car Wash you had Daddy Rich played by Richard Pryor. This is clearly in that strand.
>> Car Wash, 1976 (clip contains explicit language)
Rev. Monroe, what do you make of it?
Monroe: 'It's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than into Heaven.' [...] His real name is Mike Smith. He comes out of that tradition of [...] 'bling-bling theology.'
The Vatican hosted a conference in February called 'Women's Cultures: Equality and Difference.' The Vatican Cultural Office took heat when they used a picture of a naked, bound female torso to advertise the conference. Was that an unfortunate mistake, or just one more in a long list of tone-deaf Vatican moments?
Price: I don't know how you get around this one. That was a mess-up.
Monroe: I saw it as Fifty Shades of the Vatican. I thought it was kinky, very kinky, in that circle. [They need to] recognize women as [the church's] moral authority. [...] They need to bless the use of contraception. They should leave behind the virgin birth because good Catholic women have two choices: they can either be virgins, or mothers.
Pope Francis recently said he didn't want to have an 'endless' tenure as Pope. What do you make of that?
Price: When the Pope comes to the United States I want to figure out how I can get in front of him.
Monroe: Amen to that, because there [should be] term limits. [...] He could leave tomorrow. I would be okay with that. [...] It's a wonderful political strategy because it mobilizes his base [and disarms his opponents].
