One thing I love about Church in the Cliff is that the conversational format allows for dissent and dialogue. As soon as we began our series on saints, questions were raised: “Isn’t canonization really a political process?” “Is anyone really a saint?” “Aren’t we all saints?” Another thing I love about Church in the Cliff is that everyone came along …
A Hoping Machine, a Working Machine: St. Woody Guthrie
If Bayard Rustin is the architect of the progressive movement in America, perhaps Woody Guthrie is the soundtrack. He seems to be rediscovered as each generation finds itself, once again, in lean times. Then he is forgotten when people forget that hard times can happen to them, too. Woody always remembered because he lived it. Although he started life in …
Changing Change: Saint Bayard Rustin
Today, as I write this, it is National Coming Out Day. It is fitting, then, that this week we will canonize Bayard Rustin. He was, in many ways, the architect of the 20th century American protest movement. In 1942, thirteen years before Rosa Parks, he refused to move to the back of a Louisville-to-Nashville bus. He was arrested and beaten, …