By Steve Beard

Frederick Douglass grew up under the perverse shackles of slavery on a plantation in Maryland more than 200 years ago. He never knew the identity of his father, barely saw his mother, and witnessed unspeakable violence and bloodshed before he turned 10 years old. He was proselytized under a warped version of Christianity that had a Bible in one hand and a bullwhip in the other. It was piety unrecognizable to the Prince of Peace.

As one who escaped the bonds of slavery, Douglass (1818-1895) would become the most eloquent abolitionist orator and the most steadfast defender of liberty, equality, and justice. “Douglass spoke as a man born into bondage in America more than forty years after the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that all men were equal and endowed by God with liberty,” historian D. H. Dilbeck reports in Frederick Douglass: American Prophet, a new spiritual autobiography.

At eight years old, Douglass was sent to live with a Methodist family in Baltimore. The wife, Sophia, was kind and devout and treated Frederick with the love that children deserve. Bible reading, hymn singing, and prayers were commonplace. One night, he heard Sophia reading the Old Testament story of Job aloud. The desolation of Job’s life was spelled out: death, poverty, and relentless calamity. Continue reading →

This carte-de-visite shows a group of slaves meeting by torchlight in a cabin. A sign on the wall reads “1 Jan-Slaves Forever Free.” The title in chain links on the sides read “Waiting for the Hour – Watch Meeting Dec 31, 1862.” (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)

By DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post

Juneteenth … is one of the oldest celebrations commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It has its roots in the long-awaited moment of emancipation in Texas, where more than 250,000 enslaved black people received news on June 19, 1865 — more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — that they were free. …

In 1865, Texas slave owners had refused to acknowledge the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.

“Black people were in such a delicate situation in Texas,” said C.R. Gibbs, a historian and author of “Black, Copper & Bright: The District of Columbia’s Black Civil War Regiment.” “You have the collapse of the Confederate government. And roving bands of men who wanted to turn the clock back. A Union officer once said, ‘Given a choice between hell and Texas, I would live in hell and rent out Texas.’ It was just that bad in Texas.”

Then, on June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island with more than 2,000 Union troops. He stood at the Headquarters District of Texas in Galveston and read “General Order No. 3”:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

Black people who heard the news erupted in what Gibbs calls “a moment of indescribable joy.”

Read the entire article HERE

A group of artists honor George Floyd by painting a mural on the wall of the Cup Foods at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue south in Minneapolis.

“I would like for those officers to be charged with murder because that’s exactly what they did,” Bridgett Floyd, the sister of the victim,  said on the Today Show. “They murdered my brother. He was crying for help. I don’t need them to be suspended and able to work in another state or another county. Their license should be taken away, their jobs should be taken away, and they should be put in jail for murder.” Bridgett Floyd is hopeful that her family will receive justice in her brother’s case. “I have a lot of faith because I believe in the utmost, powerful God,” she said. “Faith is something that me and my brother always talked about because he was a God-fearing man regardless of what he done. We all have our faults, we all make mistakes, nobody’s perfect, but I believe that justice will be served. I have enough faith to stand on it.”

Here are a few noteworthy paragraphs behind the thesis of the provocatively titled New York Times opinion essay from Dr. Tara Isabella Burton.

* More and more young Christians, disillusioned by the political binaries, economic uncertainties and spiritual emptiness that have come to define modern America, are finding solace in a decidedly anti-modern vision of faith. As the coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns throw the failures of the current social order into stark relief, old forms of religiosity offer a glimpse of the transcendent beyond the present.

Many of us call ourselves “Weird Christians,” albeit partly in jest. What we have in common is that we see a return to old-school forms of worship as a way of escaping from the crisis of modernity and the liberal-capitalist faith in individualism.

Weird Christians reject as overly accommodationist those churches, primarily Mainline Protestant denominations like Episcopalianism and Lutheranism, that have watered down the stranger and more supernatural elements of the faith (like miracles, say, or the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ). But they reject, too, the fusion of ethnonationalism, unfettered capitalism and Republican Party politics that has come to define the modern white evangelical movement.

* Weird Christianity is equal parts traditionalism and, well, punk: Christianity as transgressive alternative to contemporary secular capitalist culture. Like punk, Weird Christianity has its own, clearly defined aesthetic. Many Weird Christians across the denominational and political spectrum express fondness for older, more liturgically elaborate practices — like the Episcopal Rite I, a form of worship that draws on Elizabethan-era language, say, or the Latin Mass, or the wearing of veils to church.

* The Weird Christian movement, loose and fledgling though it is, isn’t just about its punk-traditionalist aesthetic, a valorization of a half-imagined past. It is at its most potent when it challenges the present, and reimagines the future. Its adherents are, like so many young Americans of all religious persuasions, characterized by their hunger for something more than contemporary American culture can offer, something transcendent, politically meaningful, personally challenging. Like the hipster obsession with “authenticity” that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real.

Read the entire piece HERE.

Addie Jardee, one of the mermaids at the Sip ‘n Dip. Photo: Rich Addicks for The New York Times

GREAT FALLS, Mont. (AP) — For patrons at a Montana tiki bar that has a back wall of a window into a motel swimming pool, it’s typical to see mermaids in the water five nights a week.

PHOTO: GUY MENDES. Berry at home on Lanes Landing Farm in Port Royal, Kentucky.

Wendell Berry in Garden & Gun

When I was young, I picked up some expert’s advice that a writer needed to write facing a bare wall so as not to be distracted. And so I tried writing in a library carrel, in which I was constantly distracted by the suspicion that I was missing something interesting that was probably taking place elsewhere. For me, that didn’t work. To write I’ve always needed at least a big window, in warm weather a porch, on a day that is warm and dry a good sitting place in the woods. I suppose I’ve needed something of interest to look up at.

But I think my work also has benefited from distractions. There are times when my writing has had to come second to my family or my neighbors or my horses or my sheep. These reminders of things more important than writing have kept my writing firmly placed in the workaday world, where it belongs.

To read entire interview, click HERE

Ah, those jet-black Bettie Page bangs. Sixty years after they were immortalized on a pin-up icon, you still see them on the pale hipster lovelies with the cat-eyed glasses. That is just one of the lasting manifestations of Bettie Page’s industrious and enigmatic seven-year modeling career. She was a splash of rockabilly, a dash of Goth, and an extra helping of sass.

Today would have been her birthday! She died on December 11, 2008 at the age of 85.

According to Bettieophiles, she had more magazine appearances than Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford combined. In 1957, however, she suddenly disappeared and never again appeared for any photo shoot. At an altar in Florida, she dedicated her life to God, attended three different Bible colleges, was a counselor at a Billy Graham crusade in Chicago, and attempted to become a missionary. She applied to various mission boards but was rejected—not because she had been a pin-up, but because she had been divorced.

She spent the rest of her life living quietly and happily in obscurity, working as a secretary, a teacher, and then eventually living modestly off of Social Security. She had no idea that the world was intrigued by her whereabouts.
She never changed her name, or her famous hairstyle. When she was asked if she was Bettie Page, she would playfully reply, “Who’s that?”

Bettie Page was a full-fledged original. She considered Billy Graham a hero and Hugh Hefner a friend. She followed Jesus and loved to skinny dip. “I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer,” she once wrote. “I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.”

Happy Birthday Bettie Page!

A Sunday service without parishioners, last month in New York.Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

By Tish Harrison Warren

Excerpt from New York Times: For Christians, the most holy thing on earth — more than communion, the Sistine Chapel, the Holy Grail or the Rocky Mountains — is the human body. This is, in part, why a vast majority of churches in America are setting aside our sacred vessels, bread and wine, and our gathering together to protect vulnerable human bodies. The church itself is called — what else? — the body of Christ.

The story of creation in the Bible reminds us that we humans are bodies. We are not simply brains on a stick or souls trapped in a mortal prison. We believe bodies and souls are inseparably entwined (which is why Christians and other religious groups care so much about eating, drinking and sex, not because we think the body is bad or dirty, but because we think it is mysteriously connected to our very soul, but that may be for another essay).

And we believe that God came not as a book or a codex of laws or as a hologram or a creed or an idea, but as a person in a body, Jesus. In assuming a body, God redeems embodiment itself. Therefore, we believe in the resurrection not merely of the soul, floating away to some ephemeral mist, but also of the body.

Before two weeks ago, it was pretty easy to ignore the brute fact of our embodiment. … This virus has exposed that we have whole segments of society that do not have paid sick leave, and human resource policies and cultures that depend upon overlooking the pesky reality that any worker has a limited and needy body that deserves care.

We must embrace social distancing, for as long is as needed, to protect our health care system and the very real, fleshy bodies of millions of people. But we also need to collectively notice that something profound is lost by having to interact with the world and our neighbors in mostly disembodied, digital ways. This is something to lament and to grieve. And like all grief, it exposes the value and glory of the thing that was lost.

When social distancing is over, however many weeks or months that may take, I hope we each go get a strong coffee with a friend, go on a walk together and notice what a complete gift it is to do so — the remarkable grace of having a body alongside other bodies, on an ordinary day. What a quotidian, overlooked wonder we find in the textured tangibility of the physical world. And I hope that I, for one, never again take these ordinary gifts for granted.

Read her entire column HERE.