This past Sunday was rough. I am pleased to see so much happening in the wake of the events in Charleston. Seeing Confederate flags removed in Alabama and initiatives to do the same throughout the South is encouraging. However, there is so much more to do than change the racist décor. While we endeavor to keep the quest for racial …
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, …
Undone by Love: The Other (Program and Sermon)
Program Jann’s Opening Both my parents were preachers, but only one was ordained. I grew up in a small town in Louisiana in the 1950s and 60s. It was in a time in the South when water fountains were labeled “colored” and “white,” and we didn’t know gays and lesbians existed. My father almost lost his job as pastor of …