Viral Faith

  "Deification and demonization are the graves wherein we have buried all hope of genuine reconciliation, justice, and meaningful transformation. The songs we sing at that graveside are not songs of mourning and loss; only the sorrowful wailings of self-justification and self-destruction." --Allan Boesak in Pharaohs on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters  What sorrow for those who say  that evil is good and good is evil,  that dark is light and light is dark,  that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter. (Isaiah 5:20 NLT) Last month, the US celebrated Martin Luther King Jr Day, and since 1976, the nation identifies each February to remember Black history.  As an African American man, I have had mixed feelings about how each of these things are commemorated. On one hand, I am deeply grateful for and incredibly excited to honor leaders of the civil rights movement, from which I (as well as the entire nation) am the beneficiary.  One of my earliest memories i...

  "So Jews othered non-Jews, Greeks othered non-Greeks, and Romans othered non-Romans.  Each divided the world into us and them, where them is always wild, violent, unmanly, dirty, stupid, lazy, horny and yet scary.  That was, of course, because they were not actually wild, violent, unmanly, and so forth, but they were actually scary... All this ethnic othering had to do finally with trying to put a finger on that fear factor.  Why are we so afraid?"  -- Stephen Patterson in The Forgotten Creed Throughout history, cultures develop narratives to understand their identity and root that identity in community values, informed by the experiences of a people.  The narrative or myth may be based entirely on a true rendering of historical facts or can be a carefully crafted multigenerational account of fictionalized stories that support a culture/nation/people's preferred understanding of themselves.  It should not be surprising to most to acknowledge that is ...