R3 Blog Celebrates 1,000th post

If you are reading this post, we are glad to announce that this is our 1,000th blog post. When we launched our blog last year, we wanted to highlight some of the best work that examined the nexus between Rhetoric Race and Religion. When we officially launched our independent blog on October 15, 2011, we did not know we would reach over 60,000 views and publish 1,000 posts.
 
During this past year, we produced the Rhetoric Race and Religion “Readers.” We did one on the Penn State Scandal , The Aurora Shooting, Evangelicals in Defense of Mitt Romney, Fred Luter: Head of the Southern Baptist Church, President Obama and Marriage Equality, and our most popular one, the Trayvon Martin reader. We also instituted the R3 book club via twitter. We conducted tweet chats on several books; Tim Wise’s Dear White America, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Obrey Hendricks’ The Universe Bends Towards Justice, Melissa Harris Perry’s Sister Citizen, James Cone’s The Cross and Lynching Tree, Ebony Utley’s Rap and Religion and Edward Blum and Paul Harvey’s The Color of Christ. We also had the first Rhetoric Race and Religion Institute at Memphis Theological Seminary.
 
We also published numerous book reviews, call for papers, upcoming events and interviews. In addition, we also live tweeted the (vice) presidential debates. Finally, along with linking and sharing other articles via our blog, we celebrated and highlighted the work of our own contributors. Through this blog, the world met our eclectic group of scholars, community activists, pastors, preachers, and teachers. We again thank them for their contributions and support of the blog. 

We are excited about our second year and we want to build on this momentum. While we look to continue the R3 book club tweet chats, the Readers, and more critical commentary from our contributors, we seek to do much more. As we dream and discern what is next for us, we ask that you support us by sharing our blog and posts with your friends and contacts via Twitter and Facebook. If you blog with us, we ask that you share your posts and the posts of other R3 bloggers. Finally, we ask you to comment on posts as well.

As editor, this blog has taken up more time that I originally thought, but I am not complaining. I enjoy the work, the dialogue, and the feedback. Serving as editor has allowed me to meet wonderful people, read good articles and make new friends. I invite you to join us on Facebook and/or Twitter. You can follow me personally on Twitter at @aejohnsonphd. Again, we thank you for your support and please keep reading and sharing.
 
Andre E. Johnson