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Christianity
Dangerous Love
Reverend Lynice Pinkard On The Revolutionary Act Of Living The Gospels
For me, churches exist only to serve people and planet. The church is not an empire, a way for leaders to build monuments to themselves, for congregants to take pride in the curb appeal that a lovely edifice affords. The church is not a building. The church is an extension of Christ — literally Christ’s body — and an alternative to the militaristic, consumerist, alienated way of life that has become the norm.
October 2014
A Question Of Comfort
One gets used to ugliness so quickly. What we avert our eyes from one day is easily borne the next when we have learned a little more about love. Nurses know this, and so do mothers.
October 2014Beyond Belief
The first instruction was “Find a quiet place.” I went to Inwood Park and seated myself on a large rock, legs crossed, eyes closed. Immediately an airplane flew overhead. I stood up, walked a hundred yards deeper into the park, sat beside a tree, and again closed my eyes. This time I heard traffic from the Henry Hudson Parkway. Over and over I sat down, each time encountering a new distraction. Defeated, I walked home.
September 2014
The Witnesses
I could hear the Jehovah’s Witnesses before I saw them, / two black women dressed in black, / conferring politely on my porch steps. / I ran to the door to head them off.
July 2014Sisterhood
Sister Louise Akers Challenges The Church Patriarchy
The writings of the Church fathers take a misogynistic view of women. Saint Jerome, for example, said that women are a “pathway to hell,” and Saint Augustine viewed women as intellectually inferior and as a moral threat to men. This view of women was consistent through the Middle Ages, when Thomas Aquinas wrote in Summa Theologica that women are “misbegotten males.”
November 2013
excerpted from
The Color Purple
But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can’t miss it.
November 2013Sunbeams
October 2013They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
Essay In Which My Uncle Eddy And I Attend His Funeral
I want to ask Uncle Eddy how it could possibly be that he is sitting in my car as we drive through Katonah, New York, on the way to Danbury, but sometimes in life you just roll with what’s happening and try to make sense of it after it happens.
October 2013
This I Believed
I believed, even as a child, that I was being raised up in the right way to live. My family attended the local Seventh-Day Adventist church every Saturday. I sang songs about David and Goliath, and I belted out that I was “too young to march in the infantry” or to “ride in the cavalry” or to “shoot the artillery,” but not too young to serve “in the Lord’s army.”
October 2013
Selected Poems
— from “With That Moon Language” | Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to / them, “Love me.” / Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise / someone would call the cops.
October 2013
