Wade in the Water
Since Derrick Bell’s death, I have been steeping myself in his sober stories that explore how the “racial bonding of whites means that black rights and interests are always vulnerable to diminishment if not . . . destruction.”
Watching the River Flow
Every year in America, thousands of churches fail because they had nothing to say to the children—the grown children, that is, like Abram and his wife Sarai when Papa Terah made Haran home. Consider. When we won’t cross the rivers always known to us for lands never yet shown to us, money is always the matter.
Touching Taxes
Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it as “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends . . .”
About Abundance
When something breaks, we see what at once, or search for it. But when something works, like the stairs of a stone path or the good will of a teen, who can say where the working is? Anything that works comprises an infinite quantity of good links, from the big stuff we’ve just described right down to the mysteriously bonding molecules and atoms . . .
The Bottom of the Waves
The blunt fact is that scriptures Old and New pronounce a fulsome God damn not on foreign nations but on the prophets’ own land. Stiff-necked Bible-thumpers prefer Micah mounted in museum glass to the real thing. But if we do not take scissors to our scriptures, then those blunt words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright exactly match the purpose of the prophets: to that land which perverts equity through greed and force the word is, God damn!
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