Tag: race
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Some Things Still Need Explaining
Thoughts on Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2020). I have thought a lot about this book, and what I think about it, and why, mainly because I felt ambivalent about it, and because friends who also read it described feeling differently. Maybe I have thought about it so much, then, because I felt defensive,…
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Think of it as a Learning Experience
Steele, Claude M. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. W.W. Norton, 2010. [An installment of the “Read Me” Project.] This is not a book about race in the United States. And yet, it is not not a book about race in the United States, either. The concepts the author explores…
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My Mother’s Yankee Daughter
Here is a story that became a legend in our family: We were driving to church. My brother and I were kids. We were talking about the Civil War. Both of us knew it was fought to end slavery and keep the Union together, and that Abraham Lincoln was a hero. And my mother thought…
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Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
[A sermon on Acts 8:26-40, the Uniform Series text for Sunday, August 13, 2017.] What in the world are we supposed to make of this story? This peculiar story about a meeting, as it turns out, an appointment, arranged by the Holy Spirit no less, so that from one side at least it looks for…
Matters of Interpretation 