I recently told a friend and client that we couldn’t afford to give up on people who’re different from us. Even if we don’t like each other, don’t understand each other, and our antipathy is entirely mutual, our destinies are tied and we can’t afford not to care. We live on the same planet, there […]
Avoiding destiny, and making it
Jean de La Fontaine was a 17th Century verse- and fable-writer who spun ancient Greek tales into the rhythms of modern French poetry. One of the verses he’s most famous for describes the interactions between belief, avoidance, and inevitability: On rencontre sa destinée Souvent par des chemins qu’on prend pour l’éviter. We meet our destiny […]
Copeland: Deeper change is needed
The nineteenth-century notion of linear progress not only has collapsed but decayed. The cynical retreat of the nation-state, regressive programs of structural adjustment, repressive taxation, rising oil prices, gross inflation, market manipulation, food shortages, pandemics, drought, and wars have trapped not only the peoples of the two-thirds world but most of the rest of us […]
Quote: What we’re freed for
From M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Freedom from enslavement was freedom for being human. Only by analogy could the words of the Emancipation Proclamation change the order of creation, but it did remove God’s black human creatures from the plantation ledger. Statutory freedom amended the social and political status of the enslaved people. It was […]
Freedom delayed isn’t freedom.
I’d never even heard of Juneteenth until I started living in Texas. The international mythology around US abolitionism and emancipation is, like British abolitionist mythology, so thick that no one had ever told me it took the enslaved people of Texas two and half years to discover that President Lincoln’s executive order had taken effect […]
Breaking Out of Holidays, Breaking into Life
The start of the 2015 Lenten season coincided with the birthdays of writers Toni Morrison (b. 1931) and Audre Lorde (b. 1934). Lorde died in 1992, just a year before Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Had she survived breast cancer, Lorde would have been 81 years old this year. Morrison is now 84. […]
