Every so often, a historian will teach us a little more about the cast of thousands who co-created the 20th Century US Civil Rights Movement, those who preceded charismatic figures like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kwame Ture in the work, and whose stories surface far less often. In a new collection of […]
Knowing history can change the conversation
This weekend I watched an extended presentation by Bert Haloviak and Dr. Kendra Haloviak Valentine on the Adventist community’s first 150 years with female pastors. It’s part of a series of talks from 2014, and so occurred before the 2015 General Conference vote in San Antonio. Adventist Women In Ministry – Progress or Regress? from […]
Skepticism’s high price
My friend Jeanette Brantley is a storykeeper who holds her family’s tales and represents them through narratives, photograph collections, and photo-slide videos. A few months ago, she shared today’s featured photo with me. There’s quite a story behind it. Here are six young children, all smiling broadly. They’re siting in a cart in a field in […]
Copeland: How solidarity requires memory
I recently shared M. Shawn Copeland’s description of solidarity as a way of relating that has material consequences: it’s not just an ideal, it’s an ethic. In this passage, Copeland explains how solidarity also relies on our memories of past ways of relating, specifically our memories of trauma and suffering. Solidarity is an intentional moral and […]
More on the Japanese internment
This week, George Takei shared more about his experience with socially marginalized people and marginalizing social laws. I referred to his 2014 TED talk in last night’s post; this morning, he published a new reflection on his life in a United States internment camp. The United States apologized for locking up Japanese Americans. Have we […]
Reflections on the US-Japanese Internment
Lately I’ve been honoring the Santayana quotation about being doomed to repetition by referring my readers to history: Habit and memory are a sort of heredity within the individual… Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible […]