The NBA Comes to Omaha

Recently, a small-to-moderate number of eyes, all of them bleary from tuning into the late NBA playoff games, turned towards Sacramento, wondering if perhaps the Kings would be taking their talents (and terrible chemistry, coachability, and cohesion) to Seattle.  I, for one, didn't care one way or another. But if the Kings had ended up heading north, I would have felt no pity for Sacramento...after all, what goes around comes around.

There is no NBA franchise that has spurned more cities than the Kings. They began as the Rochester (NY) Royals in 1948, before moving to Cincinnati in time for the 1957-58 season. They ditched Cincinnati for Kansas City-Omaha in 1972 (changing their name to the Kings along the way), and then dropped Omaha in 1975. Ten years later Kansas City got the boot too, and since 1985 the Kings have found their home in Sacramento. 

As a resident of Omaha and an NBA junkie, I've always been fascinated by the fact that, for three glorious years, my city had joint custody of an actual NBA team. This post is for myself and for the tens of other NBA fans in Omaha (I think I've met all of you): a brief history of that time our mid-level Midwestern city kind of had an NBA team of its own. 

Yeezus Christ Superstar?

I read Edward Blum and Paul Harvey's fascinating The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America last year, and ever since, I've been thinking about the place that our images and perceptions of Christ have within American pop culture. So when Kanye West announced that his new album would be titled "Yeezus" it immediately caught my attention...not because it was a surprising title, but rather because it fits in so seamlessly with the regular appropriation of Jesus' name within rap culture.

Charles Savidge - Urban Revivalist

With the first post in this series on Charles Savidge, there is no better place to start than with the dour-looking fellow below.

Yes, the gentleman above is none other than the second greatest revivalist of the late-nineteenth century, Sam Jones.  For the purposes of this post, we'll ignore Jones' racism and New South political activism, and instead focus on his reform methods and connection to Savidge. Until the ascendance of Billy Sunday, no revivalist besides Dwight Moody could rival Jones' national reputation. With his quick wit and humor, Jones took the U.S. (and even Canada) by storm with a series of revivals in major cities in the 1880s.

Charles Savidge Stories

Charles Savidge was as a church planter, pastor, matchmaker, entrepreneur, revivalist, author, and social worker in Omaha from 1882 until his death in 1935. To date, he has been largely forgotten by historians, but his life certainly did not lack for excitement. To list just a few of his more interesting activities: he left the Methodist Church to start his own independent People's Church in the slums of Omaha; performed over 6,000 weddings and launched a matchmaking bureau; started a home for the elderly that is still in existence today; attempted (and failed) to merge his People's Church with a People's Church in Spokane; published four books; initiated an ill-fated campaign to cast the demons out of notorious pickpocket nicknamed "Fainting Bertha"; and received newspaper coverage from the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Call, and countless other newspapers across the country.