During the Montgomery bus boycott "it was black Christians teaching white Christians what it meant to be Christian," says a white Lutheran pastor who joined Martin Luther King Jr. and others in a movement to change the world.

Watch much more of our conversation with Rev. Robert Graetz, who calls the Montgomery bus boycott a spiritual movement based on love and nonviolence that transformed the hearts of people across the country.

Some have called Flannery O'Connor our only great Christian writer, a Catholic from the Deep South who said her subject was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

Forty-five years after her death, how do Flannery O'Connor's views about the South, race, violence, Catholicism, and Christian realism hold up?

"For Flannery O'Connor, race was indeed the curse of the South in the sense that it was the single most important test which we as white Christians failed."

We’re segregated in housing. The job market is segregated, and we end up going to churches with people who look like us. Experts say US churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in.

Read more of Lucky Severson’s interview about interracial churches with Rice University sociology professor Michael Emerson.

When was the last time Pennsylvania Avenue and Times Square and countless other locations across the country were packed with crowds at 1:00 in the morning following a presidential election? The same nation that elected George Bush by the hanging chads of 2000 has just given the presidency to someone who was relatively unknown at that time.

By the time The Speech of August 28, 2008 ended with an artful allusion to the March on Washington of August 28, 1963, the Democratic Convention had belatedly made a case for ending the rule of the Republicans.

Barack Obama cannot help that the election campaign until now has been mostly about him -- his background, his personality, his race, his politics, his oratory, his church, his newness, his inexperience, his family, his primary victories, his victory over Hillary and Bill Clinton, his rock star tour of Europe.