Don't Stir Things Up Too Much on King Day, Black Folks

Black people who perform or talk for a living—musicians, poets, scholars, and preachers—recognize this season between Martin Luther King's birthday and the end of February as our busiest time. Everybody wants to hear somebody black offer a stirring rendition of black life. These days, many folks want to set limits on just how stirring the black speakers are permitted to be. In a particularly egregious example , University of Pennsylvania professor and poet Herman Beavers was invited and then disinvited to give a lecture on Martin Luther King at Moorestown High School in New Jersey. With Herman's permission I have taken a screenshot of his Facebook posts because the behavior of Moorestown High School administration needs to be exposed.

And then today

What I'm trying to figure out is how administrators think shielding high school students who are on the cusp of adulthood, some of whom will vote in this year's election, from historical and contemporary reality benefits anyone.

Back at It

So, what had happened was.... To be honest I'm not entirely sure either what happened to the time or what I've been doing with the 2 years that have passed since I last updated my blog. My absence from my own thinking space is by no means a function of having nothing on my mind that required more characters than Twitter or even Facebook provided. It's not even that I forgot about the blog. On many occasions I read about some tragedy or experienced some insight or wondered aloud about some dilemma and thought, "I should blog about this." My bio that I use when I preach or give talks outside my regular bears (false) witness that I maintain two blogs. It's just that preaching and pastoring have been taking up the bulk of my creative energy in the past 4 years, with the grind of pastoral ministry taking a particularly huge bite out of my energy in the last 2 years. And then 15 months ago, I experienced the theft of sleep and subsequent constant exhaustion that come with the joys of being a (single) parent. I'm still pastor and parent, but I'm back to the blog because the version of myself that I most want to be and need to be includes writing and thinking in community. I don't know where I'll find what it takes to write regularly. I don't even know what "regularly" means for me. But I'm back at it. Happy New Year!