Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt ME! 

These words are not true. Though they have been spoken upon numerous occasions as people attempt to feel better about the experience of being injured by words spoken both unintentionally and intentionally by...

I am very sad about the amount of unkindness that I witness almost everyday. The major expression of this is through the abuse of power by dysfunctional persons who choose to abuse their power in order to feel better about themselves. Many stories of this absence of kindness can be heard in all...

As we try to hold onto our sanity while watching so many ego driven people wield their false sense of power in ways that harm those who they claim to care about, it is important to think about the power expressed in this story. Where does true power come from? What does it feel like to be in the...

If you were dying, who would you prefer to be accompanying you, an ally or a fellow pilgrim?

A fellow pilgrim is one who holds you in their heart and shares your pain and joy to the very best of their ability, no matter what it requires. This person is willing to walk a mile or two in the shoes...

The Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing is returning to the building on July 20, 2021. We join thousands of others who are cautiously returning to their physical workspaces after many months of absence due to Covid-19.

Covid-19 brought many challenges, but the most...

“When your heart is into whatever you are doing, you make it work,” says one of the members of the Dads On Duty group at Southwood High School in New Orleans. This group of forty dads, uncles and concerned men decided that they had to do something about the...

Melissa Alberta Jackson Meeks

I watched her, week after week, sitting at the kitchen table meticulously doing schoolwork that was to be sent to Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas where she was a student working on her degree in education. This was before...

A few days ago, I watched a wonderful movie that explored many of our human issues related to faith, doubt, fear, brokenness, failure, survival, and death. One of the characters spoke about being,” in love with hope.” This idea really struck a chord with me as I reflect upon the many...

...Until YOU Are Willing To Act!!!

All of us who have our hearts and heads in the right place have had enough. We are past being sick and tired of our innocent and unsuspecting youngsters going to school and not coming back home because, yet another massacre has taken their lives. The...

Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Antioch, Illinois fatally shot Anthony Huber 26 and Joseph Rosenbaum 36. He wounded a third person, Gaige Grosskreutz 26. This was done with an AR-15 style rifle in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was acquitted of all charges as his trial came to a close...

“I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”
― Vaclav Havel

I am...

There are many of us, African American, Indigenous, Asian American, Latinx and others who experience oppression, who are weary of the reconciliation conversations that continue in many circles. There is no doubt that those who engage in such conversations have good...

Violence- “the intentional use of physical force or [abusive] power, threatened or actual, against oneself, or another person, a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm or maldevelopment”

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Bobbi Wilson is African American who had the police called on her by a white neighbor. She is nine years old. She was trying to participate in her city’s campaign to rid itself of lanternflies. She learned about a spray that she could make that would help her to immobilize the...

The negative chatter about CRT( critical race theory) needs to stop. It is not a body of scholarship that is on its way to the local public school or college for that matter. Unfortunately, many of the loudest proclaimers of its dangers have no idea what actually constitutes CRT, nor do they...

Yes, you and me! Jealousy is an energy that is no respecter of persons. Most people who are willing to tell the truth can bear witness to this notion. While the major dictionary definition of jealousy is rather simple, its impact is deadly. The essential meaning as stated in...

This is an important question regarding the energy and outrage that we witnessed during the days following the George Floyd murder. Where is it now? Though we understood that folks were not going to be able to sustain public protest indefinitely, it is important not to lose...

All of us who are working to create space that allows Beloved Community to come into being wish that we could find a one-time remedy that would achieve this quickly and easily. If there is any such energy to help with achieving this in the world it can be characterized best by Dr. Howard...

It has been said that a society that allows its children to be killed is ambivalent about its future. If that is true, then the United States is deeply ambivalent. One wonders how to think about our willingness to allow our children to be slaughtered while sitting in what is supposed to be one...

Who keeps you safe? Guns or God? If you are a person who professes faith in God and you feel the need to own and perhaps carry a gun with you, it might be helpful to interrogate that position. Because when you carefully think about what creates security in the modern world, guns are...

What does reimagining policing require? It requires us to be willing to honestly review what we are doing, reform the use of police force, redefine public safety, and to address racism within law enforcement with the intent to combat it.

It is not about wholesale defunding or diminishing...

As a general rule, I work very hard to avoid thinking in terms of “them” and “us”, but the circumstances that exist at the moment lead me to reflect a bit about those categories. Thus, in this piece I want to explore those characterizations, the...

If you don’t pick up the first piece of trash from your yard, you are likely to discover one day that your yard has become a garbage dump. In terms of race relations, we have created many garbage dumps but today I want to focus on a particular one which has been...