The children

Children, children, children. Children running away from violence and poverty in Central America, children sent back to violence and poverty in Central America, children killed on a beach in Gaza, children hungry and unsafe on the streets of these United States, children deathly ill with cholera in South Sudan. Cry out, o stones.

I first posted this lament on Facebook about 12 hours ago, Wednesday July 16, 2014.

Photo: Reuters, Gaza, July 16, 2014

50th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre

21 March 1960. Remember.

For those living a difficult Christmas

Special thoughts and prayers for those who on this Christmas Eve are grieving, sad, lonely, brokenhearted, or depressed. Prayers and thoughts also for all those who live with addictions and for whom this is a particularly challenging season. May peace be with you all.

Coptic Nativity

Cross-posted on Facebook

World Malaria Day

ToujoursDan reminded us on Facebook that today is World Malaria Day. I see that he also has a post about this on his blog. Did you know that malaria is the single biggest killer of children under the age of five on the African continent?

Dan also wants everyone to know that for just $10 you can buy a net that will protect an African child from Malaria and save a life. Go here to give.

Note: I went to the site and made a "Spread the Net" donation and noticed that it is the UNICEF Canada site. Nothing wrong at all with that, but I think the $10 are thus Canadian dollars.

Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: my friend Deidre Crumbley's new book

I am just back from the book party for my friend Deidre's new book, held at St. Ambrose, Raleigh, a historically African American Episcopal church. The publisher (a university press) priced the book high and it's a hardback, but I am happy to say that Deidre's friends showed up and bought a lot of books -- and the founder of the church's Jazz Mass Quartet came and played the saxophone! There was food, particularly some excellent spinach balls. And a big cake saying "Congratulations." Here's a reproduction of the book cover.


It's a fascinating book and Dr. Crumbley (that's Deidre) has worked on it for something like 20 years. Four years of field work in Nigeria, countless rewrites, and the search for a publisher, plus illness and search for funding and all manner of obstacles. I gather there was also a cat involved at some point. Of course.

Rejoice with Deidre in her great achievement!

By the way, there are now members of African Initiated Churches, including the Aladura churches in this book, here in the U.S. -- including here in North Carolina. As Deidre noted in her short talk at the party, the African Diaspora did not end with slavery; indeed, our President-Elect is a child of this diaspora. So the African Initiated Churches, which began in the 20th century as indigenous African forms of Christianity, have migrated to other continents and are undergoing changes there.

More on the book on the publisher's website here. The full name of the book is Spirit, Structure, And Flesh: Gendered Experiences in African Instituted Churches among the Yoruba of Nigeria.

First day of school / African American religion course / Holy Angels mural

I guess blog break is over, de facto, though I will still be absent-minded and not all there till February, mas or menos.

Classes began today and despite all the grumpiness, lack of sleep, and hours in the office of this past weekend, I have first-day-of-school excitement after the first class of the semester. A nice group of students, racially mixed and also mixed in types of students ("traditional-age" i.e. 18-22 and adult students called "CCE" at our college, stands for "Center for Continuing Education") and I like the subject. This is a course I created for the college three and a half years ago when I arrived, African American Religion and Theology.

Below is the illustration from the cover of the syllabus, and below that is the explanation of the illustration on page two of the syllabus, before all the blabla about requirements and office hours and percentages and accommodations and outcomes and the course calendar with detailed list of assignments. As you will see, this is from Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago, an African American congregation. Note the Nativity scene in the middle and the heavenly host, who are all Black - as are all the angels from the biblical scenes depicted in the mural.

I may have already posted this a long while back, because as I was saving the photo to my "blog photos" file, the computer told me I already had it in there. I'm going to assume most readers either haven't yet seen this, though. It's worth gazing at again, for those of you who already know it.

Click to enlarge and see detail!

The Holy Angels Church Mural

The mural whose reproduction is on the front page of your syllabus is from an African American Roman Catholic parish church named Holy Angels in Chicago. The parish (which started as a largely Irish-American congregation) and its school have a long and proud history full of struggle and triumph. They continue to serve as centers of worship, education, and community for African Americans.

The mural was painted by the late Rev. Engelbert Mveng, S.J. The letters S.J. after someone’s name mean that person is a member of the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, a Roman Catholic religious order of men. Father Mveng was a Catholic priest, theologian, and artist from Cameroon. He was murdered a dozen years ago in Yaoundé, Cameroon. His writings and art live on.The mural is a testimony to the bonds of art, spirit, and faith between Africans and African Americans

This is the home page of Holy Angels Church:

Here is a reproduction of the mural, the same one as on your syllabus; it is a little larger here, so you may be able to see the detail better.

And here is an explanation of the illustrations and symbolism.

There is a small mistake – the last book of the Christian Testament (“New” Testament, the second half of the Christian Bible) is Revelation, with no “s” at the end, not “Revelations.” This is such a frequent mistake that few people notice it, but if you look at a Bible, you’ll see that there is no “s” there. Of course, the original is in Greek so that’s not the book’s original name anyway…

Enjoy the art.

You’ll be hearing some African American Catholic music a little later in the course, from a gospel music Mass by the composer and musician Rawn Harbor, now Director of Liturgy at St. Columba, an African American Catholic church in Oakland.

Night prayer

Now that the sun has set,
I sit and rest, and think of you.
Give my weary body peace.
Let my legs and arms stop aching.
Let my nose stop sneezing.
Let my head stop thinking.
Let me sleep in your arms.

8888888888 - Traditional Dinka prayer (Sudan)


(Found in Phil Cousineau, ed., Prayers at 3 A.M. Quoted in Jane Redmont, When in Doubt, Sing.)

Hope and discipline

I voted today. North Carolina is one of the early-voting states. I arrived at the polling place sometime after 2 p.m. and the parking lot was nearly full. Inside, there was a long line. I have never since I moved here seen so many people at the polls. I thanked the poll workers who helped me and so many others and commented to one of them about the numbers. "It's been this way every day this week," he said. (I had thought to myself that the high numbers might have something to do with its being a Friday afternoon.) "We've had about 900 people a day."

Everyone was serious and purposeful. There was a tiny bit of joking. No one said anything partisan. People waited their turn patiently and no one complained about the queue.

The comparison is not really apt, because for so many decades there was no vote for the people of South Africa, but still, the only event to which I can compare this is the first free democratic vote in South Africa, when the new photos showed us lines of people, patiently waiting, focused on their purpose, with a kind of buzz in the air that was in some ways more sober than jubilant. Government by, of, and for the people is serious business.

Like FranIAm and Grandmère Mimi, I have been obsessing about the election. For two hours before I voted and at least an hour after, I could not concentrate. I ran errands after going to vote, and at the bank I commented to the woman behind me on line (young, African American) how many folks I had just seen at the polls. "Everyone wants to get out there and make history," she said calmly.

I long for a president who will call us to service and sacrifice. We are a bloated and lazy nation in many ways --I count myself in the lot-- and it has been years, decades, since anyone has taken the lead in telling us that the energy crisis, the environmental crisis, the economic crisis, all of those and more, will require effort and self-denial on all our parts and collective work for the common good. It's our work our country needs and we need, not just "the government over there" or the corporations, though I long and call for their engagement and structural change and all the rest.

I pray that this will come to pass. I pray and I will defend to the end the rights of those who do not pray and do not wish to pray. I think Barack Obama has the potential to lead us in both hope and discipline --we need one as much as the other-- and I think it is hope that helps us to engage in discipline, and sometimes, if the discipline is healthy (a big if, I know, as abuses of political and religious power have forever shown) discipline that can lead to hope.

I pray also, in this nation whose religious liberty I will forever honor and whose establishment clause I firmly support, I pray for our nation and I pray for the safety of our candidates, of "that one" especially.

I am still stunned by the experience of voting this year. I have not seen an election like this since 1984. (Reagan's re-election and Mondale-Ferraro and the nuclear buildup.) In other ways I have never seen an election like this, and yes, race has something to do with it. I never dreamed that I would be involved in this kind of election, much less in the American South. (I am also remembering Jesse Jackson's candidacy, with all its flaws, and other predecessor events to this year's election.)

Perhaps I need not say, but I will say it anyway: the sacrifice and discipline of which I am speaking do not involve military violence.

The polar ice cap is melting, the economy is imploding, the poor are getting poorer, our soldiers die abroad, mothers clutch bone-thin children in Darfur and fathers weep for their daughters and sons in Israel and Palestine, and doggedly, with hope in our guts, we stand in line and vote.

Hope is not born in optimistic times. Hope is born in times of fear and dread and oppression and threat.


Hope and vote. Vote and hope.

September 29: Michael and All Angels

Mi-kha-el? * Who is like God?

Archangels (especially Michael) have already made their appearance at Acts of Hope, here and more recently here and here.

This is a favorite image of mine. It is by the late Cameroonian artist and Jesuit priest, Engelbert Mveng, a mural painted for Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago, an African American congregation. I use this on the cover of my syllabus for the course "African American Religion and Theology." I love the mural's colors and the fact that all the angels represented are Black.

An explanation of the mural and a guide to its many angels and their biblical stories are here.

Click on image to enlarge and show detail.

Doxy writes in from the International AIDS Conference in Mexico

Doxy has just posted eloquently from the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.

Read Doxy's report and commentary here.

We interrupt our Lambeth-free program to bring you this. Read it and weep. And pray.

Read the story behind the picture here.

Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela is 90 years old today.

Thank you, Nelson Mandela. God bless you.

Music here: Nkosi Sikelel'iAfrica: click where it says "download audio" and you'll be able to listen. You can just play it, not download; it will play on your computer's audio player. (Sorry, I don't have a magic music-playing thingie that goes in a blog post.)

Bishop Tom Shaw's trip to Zimbabwe

Bishop M. Thomas Shaw of Massachusetts, who is a member of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, has just returned from a trip to Zimbabwe, where he traveled alone and visited Anglican congregations and clergy at the request of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Read about it, and see a bit of video and a few photos, in the Boston Globe here.

Blog alert, South Africa

My old and dear friend Jim (not old in years, he's younger than I - but we have been friends forever) and his spouse Randy are far from their original home of Massachusetts and on an extended stay in Johannesburg, South Africa. Jim began a blog not long ago and his most recent post is on protests at the university where he and Randy are in Jo'burg - against the xenophobic violence about which you may have heard on the radio. He also writes about wanderings in this new landscape, in and outside the city.

A few of the photos in the most recent post don't show up (at least w/my browser), but make sure you look in the right hand column of the blog for slide shows with excellent photos of animals and other marvels.

Acts of Hope says "highly recommended blog!" Have a look.

Friday cat blogging: Maya Pavlova does postcolonial feminist biblical interpretation

Regular readers may remember that many weeks ago I (and we at Guilford College) had the honor of hosting the Botswanan biblical scholar Musa Dube, who came to speak here on her way from and to other, larger speaking engagements in the U.S. South. She spoke about African women's biblical perspectives and feminist postcolonial biblical interpretation in the age of HIV/AIDS in a session of my Liberation Theologies seminar which I opened to anyone who wanted to come. She also gave a lecture in a more formal venue on campus later the same day.

Because the number of students in the seminar is small, I teach it at home and Miss Maya Pavlova is a regular participant. Being a heterosexual girlcat, she favors the one young man in the class and always ends up settling on his lap, but this time she went to a woman, and she loooooved our esteemed scholarly visitor. So much so that I had to fetch a towel to put on the visitor's lap, because said visitor was of course wearing a beautiful black pantsuit, and you know what cats with white bellies do to black pantsuits.

Maya Pavlova sat on that scholarly lap for over an hour and listened to the whole talk and the questions and answers.

So here, in memory of beloved Krister Stendahl, whose funeral was today (I was not able to go to Cambridge for it, sadly, but hope to make it to the humongous memorial service up there on May 16) and in honor of the new generation of biblical scholars, of whom Musa Dube is a worthy and wonderful representative, we bring you Maya Pavlova, intercultural ambassador and intellectual cat. And, as always, world-class flirt.

Poet Aimé Césaire very ill

Fort-de-France, Martinique -- Poet Aime Césaire, one of the founders of the négritude movement, is very ill. I didn't even realize he was still alive... He is 94.

Better news story, the original one I saw, here, but it's in French so if you're not a francophone, you'll have to pick your way through it. The picture accompanying it is the one I have posted here.

More on Césaire and négritude here (in English) and here (also in English).

The other founders of the négritude movement are Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Léon Gontian Damas. Négritude, a cultural movement of Africa and the African diaspora, was and is the original black-is-beautiful movement in the former colonies of France in the African world. Interestingly and not surprisingly, some of its leaders were in touch with and sometimes influenced by literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Both Césaire and Senghor were statesmen as well as poets during their long and fruitful lives and are major poets in the French language. I know less about Damas and must go read up on him.

May Aimé Césaire's last days be gentle on the earth and may he hear the poetry of angels in his ears. In Caribbean French.

Friday cat blogging, first Friday in April (1)

There's an explicit copyright on this one, so I am refraining from posting it, but you must click here and see the African wild cat sleeping in a tree.

It looks like a direct relative of my Maya Pavlova and several other cats I know, and according to the photographer, it is.

The photographer is James Warwick from the UK. Says Warwick, a wildlife photographer, "I had seen this individual a number of times resting up in the same tree during the day. On this occasion I could not have wished for a more perfect pose. After a few minutes he resumed his afternoon nap. African wild cats are the main relative of all domestic cats."

C'mon, click. You need that daily "aaaawwww."

Top 50 eco-blogs (according to Times Online)

Must... stop... websurfing... But once a day it's just too tempting, and this evening brings this interesting piece of Yet More Information from Times Online. (That's The Times of London, not The New York Times.)

The top 50 eco-blogs. A good resource. Bookmark it.

Photo: Ruffled Lemur, South Africa. Mike Hutchings, Reuters, via Time (that's Time Mag)'s "This Fragile Earth" slide show.

First a sermon on Scarlett, now a trip to Atlanta

We are being SO Southern.

One of my students and I are off to a conference tomorrow (an annual gig for professors and scholars of religious studies in the region, i.e. the U.S. Southeast, and a regional unit of the big huge conference I go to in November) to learn various things and make a presentation.

The presentation is a workshop of the AAR/SBL Consultation on Teaching Feminism/Womanism and it is called "Religion, Ecofeminism, and Environmental Justice: A Pedagogical Workshop on Engaged Learning & Community Commitments." (I know, very crunchy-granola plus liberation-theology. Yes, I do teach History of Christianity, but that is another course -- which is not easy and has acquired the street name of "the Organic Chemistry of the Religious Studies Department" according to one of my colleagues, though it does have its own grooviness.)

Undergraduates do not usually present at these conferences or even attend them, but it seemed like a bad idea to have a pedagogy workshop on a particular course without the perspective of a student who actually took the course. The same student was my teaching assistant the following year for an introductory-level offshoot of this course called "Health, Spirituality, and Justice." (Another interdisciplinary crunchy-granola course. One a year, whether I need it or not. ;-)) This is also a more feminist way of doing things. And we're driving, not flying. (I don't know how pedagogical that is, it's more like girlz gotta go on road trips.)

I will be making a blog after the conference which will have resources related to this course and to the workshop. Stay tuned.

The other workshop of the AAR/SBL Consultation on Teaching Feminism/Womanism will be by A. Nevell Owens on the topic "Can A Man Teach Women Anything About Women in Religion?: A Pedagogical Workshop on Men in the Feminist Classroom."

Also, Dr. Musa Dube, who was here in the Triangle and Triad regions of North Carolina this week, will be the keynote speaker at the conference, which covers a range of topics but has a focus this year on religion and health.

Her talk is entitled "Go tla Siama, O tla Fola: Doing Biblical Studies in an HIV & AIDS Context" and it will take place at 11 a.m. on Saturday. If you are in Atlanta, write me if you want details, I think we may be able to make arrangements for non-members to come and hear this one. Leave a note in the comments section or write to me at missmayapavlova at gmail dot com.

When I return after the weekend it will be Spring Break, GLORY BE TO GODDE!

A message from Miss Maya Pavlova

My human is too busy to blog. She also has a picture of me she hasn't had time to pick up from the picture place to post here. How dare she not have time? What is more important? Besides feeding me, of course.

I had a visitor yesterday. She was a smart and beautiful woman from somewhere else and I decided she was all mine. I sat on her handsome black suit during something called a seminar right here in our living room. My human brought in a towel and put it on the smart and beautiful woman's lap. It was disappointed I couldn't leave white tummy hairs on the black suit, but the towel was soft and I sat on the very nice lap for an hour. What is Botswana? The nice visiting human said she wanted to take me back there.

I have to go back to work now: