“We have this hope” has been a Seventh-day Adventist anthem for at least five decades. “We have this hope that burns within our hearts,” we sing. “Hope in the coming of the Lord!” There’s not much like hearing 70,000 people in a single stadium banging those lines out and insisting through the emphatic, vaguely Soviet, […]
An unrecognized voice
As Walter Brueggemann argues in Sabbath as Resistance, contemporary US culture is based on excessive production. “Our motors are set to run at brick-making speed,” he writes, alluding to the ancient Hebrews in the Exodus stories who made bricks with and without straw, at and beyond quota, so they could meet their enslavers “insatiable” demands […]
Proximity does not make a community
I’m not going to watch the breaking of the second seal in Washington, D.C., tomorrow. Instead, I’m preparing to host two training sessions this weekend, and I’m thinking about what constitutes sound community. Among people who consider themselves progressive, those committed to the deep social transformation that actively creates space for typically marginalized people to […]
Power beyond the org chart
An organizational chart is somewhat like a designer’s blueprint: it tells you how leaders expect information, authority, and people to flow. It doesn’t tell you how information, authority, or people actually do move around the system. An organizational chart also focuses on the personnel who keep a system running day-to-day. It doesn’t include the people in […]
Two Brothers, One Colonial Church
This post began as a series of tweets. What do you mean you don’t follow me on Twitter? All I did was google the symbol of the burning cross. I wanted to know where it started: how the primary Christian symbol ended up aflame and overshadowed by American racists. I read that the Scottish once used the fiery […]
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, […]