Black History Month is February, which means a new season of the “Talks at the Desk” video series. This year, brief clips and highlights from the talks are available, which you can view in this post or on YouTube. We’ll keep this post updated throughout the month.
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Welcome to Episode 3 of Talks at the Desk, season 2. We are again in he U.S. Virgin Islands and visiting several of the oldest Lutheran churches in the Western hemisphere.
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Welcome to Episode 2 of the series, Talks at the Desk, season 2. We travel to the U.S. Virgin Islands and visit several of the oldest Lutheran churches in the Western hemisphere. This episode explores the history and impact of colonialism both past and present.
We meet wise and courageous people of faith who remind us about sacred struggles of the past and the presence of God and ancestors today in the work that remains to be done.
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As we enter Black History Month, be sure to visit the ELCA Justice Portal and find worship resources, educational tools and ways you can work toward racial justice in our church and our society.
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Black History Month begins this week — and so does a new season of the “Talks at the Desk” video series. This four-part series amplifies and celebrates Black voices across our church.
Wednesdays in February, 6:30pm MST, 5:30pm PST. Watch this and last year’s season videos on YouTube here. For more information and accompanying discussion guides, visit ELCA.org/ADM.
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As the nation watches another video exposing police violence against a Black man after a traffic stop, there will be great suffering and despair emerging from across the United States. In just over a week we have witnessed mass gun violence in California – twice – and the shooting of a protester at a future police training site in Atlanta. Each of these tragedies inspires grief, not only for the lives lost and forever altered but also for our loss of confidence in a system that continues to fail us, over and over.
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King’s theology is many things. It is dynamic, revolutionary and loving. But above all, his theology was actually lived, providing us with a theological legacy of a Christian answer to racism, segregation, violence and other evils. King’s daughter, Bernice, describes his life as a “walking sermon inspired by God.”
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I was 4 years old when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I was too young to understand the import of his words while he lived. Yet I remember the importance of those words, his struggles and his assassination to the Black community as I grew up in Chester, Penn. The community felt he was one of theirs. Not only was he a marvelous young African American preacher and civil rights leader, but he was also educated at Crozer Theological Seminary, just up the road in Upland, Penn.
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African Descent Ministries of the ELCA celebrates Black History Month with “Talks at the Desk,” a four-part video series that will explore diverse expressions of the church. Watch the trailer here or in this post.
A new video will premiere each Wednesday in February at 6:30pm MST, 5:30 PST. Watch them live on Facebook, stream them on YouTube or download them at https://ELCA.org/ADM.
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In the winter of 1959, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta, came to India for a month-long stay as guests of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He had long wanted to visit the land of Gandhi, the man he considered to be the father of nonviolent protest.
According to Isabel Wilkerson, author of the book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Dr. King was taken to visit high school students who came from Untouchable families. There he received the following introduction from the principal. “Young people, I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
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It’s often called the National Lynching Memorial. Located at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Ala., the National Memorial for Peace and Justice consists of 805 hanging steel rectangles that represent each U.S. county where a lynching has taken place.
One day in May, after two years of study and deep discussion about the role of reconciliation in the church, Lutherans from Duke University in Durham, N.C., stood at the memorial and reflected on its enormity with members of St. Joseph African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Durham.
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The Spirited Book Club welcomes author Elle Dowd to discuss her memoir, Baptized in Tear Gas. The online club is free, register here.
In Baptized in Tear Gas, pastor and activist Elle Dowd tells the gripping story of her transformation into an Assata Shakur-reading, courthouse-occupying abolitionist with an arrest record, hungry for the revolution.
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Happy National Hispanic Heritage Month! As we celebrate, I can’t help reflecting on what is being celebrated: independence, legacy and identity. As far as my own identity, I grew up, like many Puerto Ricans, hearing the poems and songs that claim we all have a Black grandma hidden away somewhere. There was this shared idea among the people in my life that, no matter how hard we try to hide it, somewhere in our DNA we are all Black.
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On Wed. Aug. 10, 2022, the ELCA Churchwide Assembly received a presentation on the “Declaration of the ELCA to American Indian and Alaska Native People” adopted by the ELCA Church Council last September.
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View the apology to Iglesia Santa María Peregrina at the 2022 Churchwide Assembly.
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Where will we be on Independence Day 2065? With God’s grace, I hope to live to see it. I hope to see it and smile, as my ancestors are today watching over me as I walk these same streets. Mere footsteps on the long path to justice. Inches closer on the road to freedom.
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On this Independence Day, I encourage us all to spend some time relearning our shared history. Take time to read through five reflections written by Women of the ELCA participants as part of a study of the ELCA Declaration to People of African Descent. Review the Repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, adopted by both the ELCA (in 2016) and affirmed by Women of the ELCA (in 2017). It’s a start.
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To be a female, Black and gay pastor on “Freedom Day” necessitates a certain amount of introspection, for my relationship with the church has long been a queer dance whose steps I don’t often apprehend.
Galatians 3:28 says: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Yet this oneness has been elusive in the ELCA and elsewhere, has it not?
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In her sermon, my pastor lamented that “each person killed was a precious and irreplaceable child of God,” on the Sunday following the racially motivated massacre of 10 shoppers and workers at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. The irreplaceability of each person made in God’s image stands in marked contrast to so-called “Great Replacement” theory, the fear that stoked the White shooter’s hatred and motivation to target and gun down people of African descent.
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