Easter in Ordinary

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...