Joe Carter and the Legacy of the African American Spiritual

Speaking of Faith is one of my favorite NPR programs... always probing interesting dynamics of spiritual life. The following episode, from July 2008, focuses on Joe Carter and the African American spiritual:

The spiritual is celebrated in American culture and beyond. It is the source from which gospel, jazz, blues, and hip-hop evolved. It was born in the American South, created by slaves, bards whose names history never recorded. The organizing concept of this music is not the melody of Europe, but the rhythm of Africa. And the theology conveyed in these songs is a potent mix of African spirituality, Hebrew narrative, Christian doctrine, and an extreme experience of human suffering.

We celebrate the life of Joe Carter, who explored the meaning of the Negro spiritual in word and song — through its hidden meanings, as well as its beauty, lament, and hope.

Check it out here. It is well worth a listen...

The Wisdom of Howard Thurman

• “Religious experience is dynamic, it’s fluid, it’s effervescent, it’s yeasty… all these words. But the mind can’t handle that, so it has to imprison the religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when it gets quiet enough – it meaning the religious experience – then the mind draws a bead on it and extracts out of this ferment concepts, notions, dogmas, so that the religious experience will make sense to the mind. But meanwhile, the religious experience goes on experiencing! Therefore, whatever creed there is, whatever theology there is, it is always a little out of date. This is why I feel, once a religion is stated in terms of dogma, or interlocutions, perhaps, then it can become the source of propaganda… But as long as the experience is vital, the only way that it can spread is by contagion, not by instruction, not by addressing the mind, but as something you catch, as you catch the measles… This is the nature of religious experience, whatever kind it is.”

• "When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among others, To make music in the heart."

• “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

• “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.”

• “Commitment means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve centre of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies.”

• “During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.”

• “A dream is the bearer of a new possibility, the enlarged horizon, the great hope.”

• "Follow the grain in
 your own wood."


• "To keep a lamp burning,
 we have to keep putting
 oil in it."

• “Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers.”

Howard Thurman on Spiritual Experience

It is Sunday, here is Howard Thurman, who was one of the important influences on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., discussing the ever-evolving and dynamic experience of spirituality (2 minutes in length):


Here is a GREAT article from The Atlantic in 1953 about Dr. Thurman, his life and philosophy. Check it out!

What do you think?

Robert Coles and the Inner Lives of Children

It's Sunday and Speaking of Faith had a whole program devoted to a great interview with one of my favorite people, psychiatrist Robert Coles. The interview, which is from 2000, focuses on "the inner lives of children."  Coles "says children are witnesses to the fullness of our humanity; they are keenly attuned to the darkness as well as the light of life; and they can teach us about living honestly, searchingly and courageously if we let them." Righteous. I hope you might make some time and tune in here.

"Play, Spirit and Character"

It's Sunday...

What is the role of "play" in our lives? How is play linked to our spiritual selves?

That is the subject of NPR's Speaking of Faith program, "Play, Spirit and Character." Click here to listen to "Stuart Brown, a physician and director of the National Institute for Play, [who] says that pleasurable, purposeless activity [play] prevents violence and promotes trust, empathy, and adaptability to life's complication. He promotes cutting-edge science on human play, and draws on a rich universe of study of intelligent social animals."

What do you think?

The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Joshua Heschel

It's Sunday, time for another exploration of some random aspect of spirituality that I find interesting! This week, I hope you might take some time to listen to an audio program by the people who create NPR's "Speaking of Faith" on Abraham Joshua Heschel. Who the heck is that, you ask? Here is what the folks at SoF write:

"Abraham Joshua Heschel insisted that the opposite of good is not evil, it is indifference. Born into an esteemed Hasidic family in Poland in 1907, he was a mystic who wrote transcendent, poetic words about God. At the same time, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and organized religious leadership against the war in Vietnam, embodying the social activism of the biblical prophets he studied. We explore Heschel's teachings and his prophetic legacy — his "spiritual audacity" — for people in our time."

Check out the whole program. Make it today's meditation. Heschel is a fascinating person with a relevant spiritual perspective for our desperate times...

Any thoughts? What lesser-known spiritual figures do you find insight from?

Politics and Faith in the Democratic Party

It's Sunday! NPR's "Speaking of Faith" looked at the role of faith and spirituality within the Democratic Party this morning and I thought some of you might want to check it out. If you click here, you will find a few different options on how you can listen. Here is their brief intro to the program:

The Religious Right has gotten a fair amount of coverage in recent years, while the political Left has rarely been represented with a religious sensibility. Our guest, a national correspondent for Time magazine is a political liberal and an Evangelical Christian who has been observing the Democratic Party's complex relationship with faith and the little-told story of its response to the rise of the Religious Right.

Any thoughts about the nexus between spirituality, faith, religion and the liberal/left in American politics? I'd be interested to hear what you think...

Book Salon: "Progressive & Religious"

Well, it is Sunday, so here is an interesting "book salon" from Firedoglake with author Robert Jones (no relation) about his new book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders Are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book delves into the way some progressives find the source for their political values in their spiritual traditions. In an age when the radical religious Right dominates the public perception/discourse over faith and politics, this is a nice alternative.

What do you think about the nexus between faith, spirituality and progressive politics?

Bill Moyers Lays It Down on Obama, Wright and Race

Here is what Bill Moyers had to say about Obama, Wright and race in the U.S.

(If you are not familiar with Moyers' work, check out his television show on PBS.)

May 2, 2008
BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright's transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a psychologist. Many black preachers I've known - scholarly, smart, and gentle in person -- uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I've known many white preachers like that, too.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of a preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it?

Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".

What do you think?


UPDATE: Frank Rich strikes a similar chord in his NYTimes column today. The heart of the matter for Rich is this:

"... it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick...

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000."

Fact Check: Barack Obama's Church

There has been much controversy surrounding Barack Obama's affiliation with Trinity United Church in Chicago. Past comments by the out-going minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which recently appeared on YouTube, have stirred rancor, leading Obama to publicly repudiate those comments and Wright to leave his symbolic post in Obama's campaign. I don't want to jump into the specifics of Wright's comments here at this time, but do want to offer some broader context on Obama's faith and his Church...

Before I do that, allow me to make a somewhat obvious point: Hopefully, the silver lining in all of this hoo-ha over Rev. Wright and Trinity United is that it should put to rest once and for all the bogus smear that continues to circulate on the internet and in gossip that Obama is a Muslim. Very clearly he is not and has never been Muslim. Ok? Got it? Good. Tell your friends...

Now that that is out of the way, let me go further and write the while Obama is not a Muslim, but a practicing Christian who believes that Jesus is the son of God, if he were Muslim that should be immaterial to his candidacy. Just like belief in Christianity should not be a prerequisite to elected office, in general, a belief in Islam should not rule any citizen out from running for office or serving his or her country in the political sphere.

Anyway, on to the main reason I am hitting this topic this morning...

First, here is Barack's statement yesterday about Wright's comments and his own faith journey:

Barack Obama, "On My Faith and My Church"

Second, here is a nice YouTube by a white minister who also attends and ministers at Trinity. It is significant that she is white considering the belief out there in the media-ether that Trinity is a black-only church. It is not:



Last, here is an EXCELLENT article on Trinity, situating the church within a broader context of race and faith stretching back to the civil rights/Black Power era. I've posted this one previously, but it is well worth another look:

Jason Byassee, "Africentric Church: A visit to Chicago's Trinity UCC"

So, take a little time to look a little deeper into Trinity's faith community. Do some exploring for yourself and I think you will find that on balance, this is a very positive, inclusive and spirit-filled church that situates social justice at the forefront of their theology.

Bill Moyers in dialogue w/ James Cone

This is a really interesting and insightful Bill Moyers interview with Christian theologian and philosopher, James Cone. During the Black Power era, Cone articulated what he called a "black liberation theology" and has since continued to put forth a radical and prophetic vision of Christ. "Any message that is not related to the liberation of the poor in a society is not Christ's message," Cone argues. "Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology."

The interview posted here is based on a lecture Cone gives, titled, "Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree." Here is what Cone has to say by way of introducing the topic:

I know that the cross and the lynching tree are not comfortable subjects to talk about together. Who wants to think about lynched black bodies in church worship? Or when doing a theological reflection on Bonhoeffer's question "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" This is exactly what I contend the Gospel requires Christians to do-especially preachers and theologians. I claim that no American Christian- white, black, or any other color-can understand correctly the full theological meaning of the American Christ, without identifying his image with a recrucified black body hanging from a lynching tree.

Black poets and other artists like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois realized the religious meaning and symbolic connection of the cross and the lynching tree. But this connection failed to ring a theological bell in the imagination of white theologians and their churches. Not many black theologians and preachers have made an explicit connection between the cross and the lynching tree either. So I want to start a conversation about the cross and the lynching tree, and thereby break our silence on race and Christianity in American history. I began this reflection in the only place I feel confident to speak as a theologian: the black religious experience. I was born into this reality, and have wrestled with these paradoxes and incongruities since childhood. If I have anything to say to the Christian community in America and around the world, it will happen as I stand as a theologian on the reality that sustains and empowers black people to resist the forces designed to destroy every ounce of dignity in their souls and bodies.

Cone is deep, a man of fierce intelligence. The Moyers interview (below) is worth some serious consideration... and is perhaps not a bad meditation for the new year:

part 1:
(9:33)

part 2:
(9:08)

part 3:
(9:42)

part 4:
(6:04)


Here is a well-known quote by Cone: "Anger and humour are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to opression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury."

If you'd like to watch a video of Cone delivering the full "cross & lynching tree" lecture/sermon at Harvard, click here:

James Cone, "Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree," Harvard University, October 2006

onBeing

The Washington Post has been doing a very cool and interesting ongoing (video) series at their website, titled, "onBeing." It is a collection of brief interviews with individuals who share their particular way of being, their philosophy of life.

Here is how the website explains it:

"onBeing is a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better. What you’ll find here is a series of videos that takes you into the musings, passions, histories and quirks of all sorts of people. The essence of who they are, who we are."

"There will be a new video every Wednesday, so check back often. In the meantime, feel free to add your thoughts to the comments section and tell us about someone you’d like to see in onBeing. Over time, we should end up with a pretty cool community."

Each slice of humanity, if you are open to it, has something to offer. Through everyone's little (and sometimes big) wierdnesses, we catch sight of that which links us together. It is really quite affirming, I think.

Check it out...

onBeing

What would you talk about...?

Baby Got Book!

Well, as a native Clevelander and someone interested in spiritual matters, what better first spiritual post than this rappin' preacher from my hometown! Whatever reaches the flock, right? Dag. People are so strange...

Baby Got Book!