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The Gifted Classes

I have nothing to say about the politics of poverty, what causes it and what it causes and how to make it go away. I can only tell you what poverty does to a person. It gets inside you, nestles into your bones, and gives you a chill that you cannot shake. Poverty becomes you — it shapes what you see and taste and dream — till there is no telling where you stop and poverty begins. To be poor is to live in denial — not the denial of professional counselors and self-help books, which is an avoidance of some truth too painful to admit, but denial in its most literal sense: you must say no to yourself constantly.

The Slave Chair

On a spring day in 1958, I circled the table in my grandmother’s dining room, trying to figure out one of her “test tables.” The test-table challenge worked like this: My grandmother set a formal table, purposely committing an array of errors so subtle even Emily Post couldn’t spot them — turning a knife blade in the wrong direction, placing an iced-tea spoon where a soup spoon should be. My job was to do what Emily Post could not.

All My Previous Poems

Over and over, / I have submitted poems / to this magazine. / Over and over, / the editor / has rejected them. / Finally, / he accepted / this poem.

— from “this poem”

Crimes Of Punishment

An Interview With Christian Parenti

I describe SWAT teams in Fresno as a kind of postmodern public execution — a highly ritualized, highly theatrical display of the sovereign’s power. Like an invading army, they occupy whole neighborhoods, harass the residents, and surround the houses. They have machine guns, barking dogs, and armored personnel carriers. This is state propaganda, political theater, directed not at the “perp” holed up in the house, but at the hundreds of community members watching.

July 2000

If I’m not too busy to breathe, I’m not too busy to be thankful for breathing. If I’m not too busy to smile at a stranger, I’m not too busy to remember we’re breathing the same air.

Reconciled

I was laughing at myself, at twenty years of a ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication, an attempted negation of Jesus. A ministry of human engineering, of riding on the coattails of Caesar, of playing in his ballpark, by his rules, and with his ball; of looking to government to make and verify and authenticate our morality, of worshiping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia, of making an idol of the Supreme Court; a theology of law and order and of denying, not only the faith I professed to hold, but my history and my people — the Thomas Colemans. For, as much as Jonathan Daniel, they were loved. And if loved, forgiven. And if forgiven, reconciled.

Radical Grace

An Interview With Will D. Campbell

 When we said, “Be a Christian,” who we really got that from was Thomas Merton: Be what you are. You are already katallagete; you are already reconciled. So behave as if that’s true. It’s a fine point to make, but it’s a very important and, I think, radical point.

Rules

A wrong-way driver, a good little girl, a billionaire