The right train headed in the wrong direction is the wrong train for you. Tonight, while heading home from a remarkable lecture by Professor Hortense Spillers at Barnard College, I found the right train line to take me back towards Harlem. Then I zoned out just long enough to transfer onto an express train going […]
Editing Means Reality Shaping
Black History Month means unearthing grainy black-and-white photos of Black people from archives, backrooms, and attics everywhere. The New York Times played this storyline literally this year, announcing a month-long series of photos never before published in the print newspaper or digital site. The newspaper’s photographers once wandered Black neighborhoods and followed Black civil rights leaders and […]
What Are You Compelled To Do?
“You are not called to be the poster children for the status quo. Stretch into whatever vocation you are called to do… Refuse to live your lives in the past tense, the sad what-ifs, the dead-end maybes, the rootless and fruitless could-bes.” —Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes “If, indeed, womanist theology is accountable to ‘ordinary’ Black […]
Transcript: Toni Morrison at Portland State, 1975
Educating the conqueror is not our business. —Toni Morrison Last week some of us heard for the first time a presentation that Prof. Toni Morrison made in May 1975 during a public lecture series on the theme of the American Dream. “A Humanist View” begins by surveying technically objective shipping records. Comparing the records’ descriptions of rice, tar, […]
When Christians Use People to Prop Up Books
Content note: Frank references to rape, sexual violence, bible passages, and Christian obtuseness. “It’s evil, but it also happens to be scriptural… Tell the whole story.” —Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney
Olive Hemmings, Richard Rice on Ordination & Interpretation
Black women have always comprised anywhere between 65 and 90 percent of membership in black [US] churches — institutions where they are largely excluded from the religious polity… Religion that began in slave communities is the only ancestral tie American-born blacks have to something like a family tree. But black churches, like many of their white […]
