Posts

Bricks Without Straw: Hidden Figures, Young Clergy Women, and Intersectionality

I have been excited to see Hidden Figures for months. The trailer gave me deeply satisfied laughter, hope, and inspiration. The poster gave me goosebumps. I knew I was going to love this movie from the moment I learned that it existed. It exceeded my expectations. Hidden Figures tells the story of Katherine Goble Johnson […]

#BlackGirlMagic-alMinister

“Just make it magical,” I said. I looked at the makeshift learning space: a hallway, really. This was where our church would be asking our children to go in-depth about Jesus for the next year and a half, while we completed our all-encompassing construction project. Everything had to be added to the space; it came […]

Go Back To Your Country

It was on the way to pick up the kids from school. I slowed to a stop at the crosswalk that connects a paved walking trail with a rails-to-trails path on a fairly busy street in Bloomington. I had seen the bicyclist slow down to wait to cross, but even though I was in a […]

Strong Women and White Privilege

“You come from strong women,” my grandmother said. It was late on a Monday evening in the winter of 1991. We were up late on a school night, and my grandparents were visiting, because I had been confirmed that evening. Granny gestured to the small photographs of her parents that sat in a double frame […]

Why we don’t always feel like talking about race (and what to do about it)

The time is ripe for race talk. The problem is, some people don’t always feel like talking. A variety of recent events have added to a surge of desired dialogue on the black experience, but after years of talking, some black people are too tired to engage. As an African American clergywoman, I feel this […]

I Take the Saints With Me

Growing up, church was… interminably slow. Not bad, just slow. Like the waving of a cardboard fan in the hands of a church mother, it was steady and sure, and time just sort of “hung” in church. So there was lots of time to people-watch. The people I especially loved were the old saints, these […]

A Prayer for My Sons

A Prayer for My Sons: God, protect them. Protect them from ignorance of their privilege and the advantages they will have as white men. Protect them from entitlement. Protect them from being indoctrinated into a system of white, male violence against women and against people of color. Protect them from the temptation to stay silent […]

Ask a Young Clergy Woman: Anti-Racism Edition

Dear Askie, I love my congregation, but I’m starting to think I might have to close my Facebook account. I have a few congregants whose postings are driving me crazy! We do disagree politically (I’m more liberal, they’re more conservative), but I think it goes beyond that. I often see them posting racist and Islamophobic […]

Being the Church in Pre-Post Racial America

Rarely can a book successfully weave together complex theological concepts, social justice frameworks, and the stories of ordinary people of faith. Pre-Post Racial America: Spiritual Stories from the Front Lines does just that. The book’s author, Sandhya Rani Jha, is deft at the art of storytelling. Her insightful analysis of the theology of racial/social justice-making […]

Invited into ‘Between the World and Me’

Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates 152 pp. Spiegel & Grau. When my son Moses was baptized I wrote him a letter about what baptism means for me. It was very much a letter from a pastor-mom to her son, touching on both the personal and theological, each in their turn. I read the […]