Easter in Ordinary

Weekly, I share links to four articles that I found significant, accompanied by a poem. Our lives are enriched by seeing better. One article comes from the world of photography, a discipline intent upon shaping how we see. Another article takes up technology, hence seeing something of the future. Another takes up an aspect of our common life, seeing more clearly together. Another article refers to faith, seeing the unseen. Finally, the weekly post concludes with a poem, because poetry is about seeing words whose arrangement allows us to see anew. This week, we begin by examining the budget-making process of the U.S. Federal government. Do not yawn yet; there are valuable treasures in the article. Then, under science, we see how Nobel laureates look at dollars and the literal death of the middle class. Under the faith heading, we consider the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and in photography we visit Our Lady of Guadalupe on her feast. Our poetry as well underscores this beautiful feas...

I just came across an article from The Washington Post , Why Pope Francis’s silence on black America may soon end , and, while it breaks new ground, I would suggest re-focusing some of its conclusions. Take a minute, go read the article, and come back, please. I have been struck in recent months by the challenges before us, as a nation and as a Catholic Church in the U.S., around the issues of race. I was out of the country until the end of March. I watched from abroad as events unfolded in Ferguson, MO. Living in Chile these last years, I perceived anew some of the warped ways that we attend to race in the U.S., ways that are peculiar to our history. Also, in recent months, I have been reading Bryan Stevenson , Michelle Alexander , john a. powell , and Ta-Naheisi Coates . Increasingly, issues around race, structural racism, and implicit bias have been a growing concern for me. The Pew Research Center recently ranked Catholics as among the most racially diverse faiths in the ...

In my circles, an ardent buzz has been around Ta-Nahesi Coates' Between the World and Me . Jon Stewart , at the end of his run, interviewed him. President Obama is reading him on vacation . Friends have read him this summer and recommended him. Flying to Washington, D.C. recently, he came up in conversation with a stranger after discussing Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow , which the stranger was reading. The book has drawn its stream of praise (e.g., Michelle Alexander in The New York Times ) and criticism ( Rich Lowry in Politico.com ). The book arrived some time ago, but I finally took Monday afternoon and devoured it. Coates, inspired by rereading James Baldwin 's The Fire Next Time , structures his book, written to his son, in three segments. Coates' description of the body, especially the Black body, and the violence done to it was striking. Coates' description and dismissal of the Dream and the Dreamer appeals to me as bearing a weighty truth. The b...

Friends, I am gathering information on how particular parishes and local communities are responding to Black Lives Matter. Your input and your sharing this with others would be very valuable to me. I'd like to get a picture of what is happening on the ground in the area of preaching and what the congregation desires in preaching. I'd be grateful if you would give me a few minutes of your time, and, then, please, ask your friends for some of their input, too. Loading...

This year, I have read a handful of extraordinary books on race: Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness , Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (which I will profile soon), and, most recently, john a. powell's Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society . The three authors, all attorneys, write at length about the criminal justice system and the courts. As well, all three authors tell a story with the power to upend a comfortable world-view. With a shelf full of publications and a 32-page curriculum vitae, john a. powell (spelled without capitals) is a scholar in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a host of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy. He is the Executive Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to dua...