“Say it loud. ‘I’m black and I’m proud.’” ~ James Brown It was 1968 and James Brown was the conductor of a chorus who sang about black pride, empowerment and self- reliance. It was a call and response of black power. And timidity was not appropriate; instead, persons were encouraged to “say it loud.” In […]
“I was regretting the past and fearing the future. Suddenly my Lord was speaking: ‘My name is I AM.’ He paused. I waited. He continued. ‘When you live in the past, with its mistakes and regrets, it is hard. I am not there. My name is I WAS. When you live in the future with […]
“There’s a certain learned passivity about the spiritual life that is hard to program and hard to make popular. People who give leadership in spiritual direction, the good ones, that’s basically what they’re doing: they’re trying to train us and teach us how not to be in control of our lives; to enter into what […]
“How can we pray accurately for and harmoniously with the other members of God’s people? Through song: song establishes all the members of the congregation in organic relationship. The Christian recovers a sense of community and experiences the dynamics of community not through the categories of sociology but through the music of liturgy. We would […]
Race hurts. It hurts because it attacks the essence of who we are and it gets personal. It talks about our appearance, who our parents are, where we live and how we behave. It either says that it is wrong and bad or that it is good and better; either way, it places us at […]