Slavery, the Myth of American Innocence, and the Heritage of Historic Racism in the U.S.: Facing What's Real

White America, as it turns out, has a long and storied tradition of not knowing, and I don't mean this in the sense of truly blameless ignorance, for this ignorance is nothing if not cultivated by the larger workings of the culture. We have come by this obliviousness honestly, but yet in a way for which we cannot escape culpability. 

~ Tim Wise, "White America's Greatest Delusion: 'They Do Not Know It and They Do Not Want to Know It,'" Alternet

"Those Squeezed Out Deliberately as Human Junk from the System’s Own Evil Operations": A Meditation on Eve of Palm Sunday

For this weekend that begins Holy Week, some meditation points (for me, at least, they seem valuable meditation points connecting to Holy Week):

"The Sight of Fossilized Light in a Growing Universe": Rachel Maddow's Resurrectional Reflection on the Struggle for LGBT Human Rights

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Lent, Easter, Jesus and the Victims of History: A Meditation

Lent ends today, and it's my 63rd birthday, and I find myself in much the same place in which I was as my 60th birthday approached--and as I remembered my mother's death last year. Throughout Lent this year, I have been haunted by thoughts of the children mercilessly gunned down last Christmas. To be specific: I am haunted by the question of how one prays in the face of such tragedy. I'm haunted by the question of where God is as such tragedy occurs.

More on Remembering: Metz and the Suffering of Ancestors

To complement what I posted earlier today in remembrance of my mother's death, another passage from Elizabeth Johnson's Search for the Living God (NY: Continuum, 2008)--(I warned you I'd probably be quoting this book incessantly in coming days, no?).  Here, Johnson is summarizing a central point of Johann Baptist Metz's theology of dangerous memory: 

On the Obligation Not to Forget: The Challenge of Hope in Faith Communities

What haunts me, as I move towards a new phase in my life (I’m approaching a birthday that’s symbolic to me, as I’ve noted previously—my 60th—and one . . . ponders . . . as one ages):  

Where does hate go?  What happens to it, when it’s done its dirty work, had its field day, and been temporarily vanquished?

In one sense, I ask these questions naively, because I know their answer perfectly well.  In speaking of “hate” here, I’m talking about the intractable, venomous, never-overcome tendency of people in any human group to single out a particular sub-set of their community for scorn, demonization, exclusion, and often, active persecution that may even result in their eradication.