This Valentine’s Day, I pay homage to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1924 novel “Dark Princess” because it highlights the least talked about subject then and now: Black love.
Let me say that again for the people in the back. I’m tired of giving money to charities. I’ve served the church in development and parish life for over 20 years. I don’t believe giving is wrong. The Bible tells us God loves a cheerful giver and infers that we can’t out give God. So why do I say I’m tired of giving to charities?
Recently, a half-dozen young people in our small town organized a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration. The march was seen by some as an intrusion of threatening other-worldly politics into our predominantly (99.8%) white town and riled up a lot of emotional responses on social media.
A democracy is only able to function and prosper if its diverse citizenry shares a common sense of what is good. A political common good, however, is made possible by the presence of common ground; this ground is the Reality of Being, the Essence of all that is. Without spiritual common ground, which is Being, the fragile political common good is a chimera, evident in the cultural blindness to and destruction of the beauty of George Floyd.
His name is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, but the world will know him as Pope Francis I. He was a surprise selection by the Conclave of Cardinals voting in the …