Ma'Khia Bryant should be alive. It breaks my heart that people would rather see her as a deranged monster with a knife rather than a beautiful human who deserves to grow up and get old and make mistakes and make friends and have fun. She didn't deserve bullets. She deserved love.
But the sad reality is this: we seem to be incapable of seeing Black children, women, and men as deserving of love. In the inability to love us lies the justification for all the ways we have been devalued and destroyed. But I believe we deserve so much more. So much more.
I wonder what would happen to the country and to policing if they exercised the same grace, same restraint, same desire for safety, and the same honoring of humanity toward us as have toward white Americans? How different would this country and our experience be?
God, be near to all those whose family members, whom they love deeply, have had their lives taken. They are neither hashtags nor are their lives reduced to movements and legislation. Their lives are more. They are worth remember and fighting for, yes. But they should be alive.

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More from @stewartdantec

28 Apr
Changing America is not only right but it is loving and just when the country is unequal and unjust. "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive..," the Declaration declares, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."
It is not a bad thing when people say those of us who want better want to "change America's identity." It is a bad thing when people can't recognize that the way things are going can't be sustained. America is not a city on the hill, it is the valley of the Shadow of death.
Sadly, when people use this rhetoric, it's clear that they don't see they want to change the country as well. They want to keep it more white, less equal, more divisive, less healthy, more powerful, less honest, more hateful, and less loving. Their ideas of "we" don't include us.
Read 4 tweets
27 Apr
Critical Race Theory does not claim to be theological nor does it claim to want to replace theology. What it will do is show you how your Christian faith looks more like anti-blackness than it does like Jesus and the ways your theology devalues, harms, and needs to be rethought.
Critical Race Theory is compatible with Christianity. Critical Race Theory is not an enemy of Christianity. Critical Race Theory is not trying to replace Christianity. Critical Race Theory helps Christianity. Critical Race Theorist are also Christians.
Critical Race Theory has become the new enemy of the religious and political Right to mask their fear of the dismantling of white supremacist power, place, and privilege. The political and religious Right needs “enemies” to feel like they matter and maintain power.
Read 11 tweets
27 Apr
Christian faith is not just about proclaiming the faith in a world that is blinded. It is also about embodying a dependable presence in a world that is broken. Our faith is not about winning, controlling, or proving. Our faith is about liberating, healing, and loving.
I wonder if the struggles we Christians have with compassion and justice is rooted in our inability to see this. "Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples," Toni Morrison writes, "are so deep, so cruel..only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning."
Morrison might have been talking about writers but this is applicable to our faith as well. The faith that Jesus embodied and proclaimed is one that "translate trauma and turn sorrow into meaning." We can only do this through presence and imagining a faith of love not control.
Read 6 tweets
26 Apr
I am reading my gospel reading this morning. "Peace I leave with you," Jesus says. "My peace I give you." I recently read in Toni Morrison's The Dancing Mind. She said there is a certain kind of peace that is not at the mercy of history's rule or a surrender to the status quo.
"The peace I am think of," she writes, "is the dance of an open mind." I find it interesting that she said suggests that this peace is the ability to have an open mind. Not a burdened mind. Not an exhausted mind. Not a hateful mind. Not a faithless mind. But an open mind.
When one reads the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Scriptures, we can't miss how the mind is a meaningful metaphor. Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind, Jesus says. Be transformed by the renewal of your mind, Paul says. Get wisdom, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes says.
Read 9 tweets
25 Apr
I am reading in the Psalms this morning. “Sing to the LORD a new song,” they write, “because he has done wonderful things!” It is as if the psalmist is saying: your praise should not just be dependent on where you’re going, it should also be an expression of where you’ve been.
The song may be new, but my experience of God is not. It’s interesting to me that the psalmist words it this way. The situation requires a new song but the praise requires a familiar history. “He has done,” they write. The past is not perfect but the past can be powerful.
This reminds me of a story the late theologian James Cone told of first meeting the late pastor and spiritual leader Howard Thurman. Thurman, whom many regarded as the pastor of the Civil Rights Movement, invited Cone to visit he and his wife after speaking at an event.
Read 8 tweets
24 Apr
I was reading theologian M. Shawn Copeland’s book on the witness of Black religion today. She writes that our faith was not a reproduction of white Christianity but an experience of “Jesus Christ as the Bringer of Freedom.” Even in a slaveholding faith we met a liberating God.
Black faith and religion is not just an academic endeavor, a way of resisting whiteness, or reproductions of white theology. They are a way a constellation of Black people show the deepest love, embrace God’s image on Black bodies, and say: the Black world is a real world.
Theologian James Cone said he didn’t discard white theology, "but black theology began with deconstruction—that is, dismantling the oppressive, white theologies I was taught.” These theologies not only ignored black people but “blinded me to the treasure in the black tradition."
Read 7 tweets

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