December 16, 2024

With poet Nikki Giovanni’s passing, the tributes continue to flow. Kevin Young, poet, essayist, and Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture paid tribute in a recent New Yorker article, “Nikki Giovanni’s Legacy of Black Love.”

Young observes that often contrarian Giovanni wrote “across the decades” about ecopoetics, family, and justice. She also “preferred to remind readers that ‘Black love is Black wealth,’” and her love spread throughout the Black Arts Movement and beyond.

The Guardian’s article emphasizes her accessible poetry about liberation, gender, love, and the small pleasures of daily life.

We send greetings for the season with a perhaps lesser-known poem, “Christmas Laughter,” a glimpse of her family’s enjoyment of the varied “senses” of the holiday.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church December 16, 2024

December 2, 2024

On Thanksgiving Day, people gathered on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth for the annual Day of Mourning. This tradition was established in 1970, spearheaded by Wamsutta (Frank) James, a Wampanoag and activist. James’s son, Moonanum James, now organizes the event.

Prayers for this day often include remembering the losses of Indigenous communities, and praying for healing, truth-telling, and the capacity to be instruments of justice during our lives.

More recently scholars in religious studies have advocated for the study of “living religion” or religion as practiced. The practice of praying for Indigenous peoples was often the first step in a journey of contact with Christianity. Conversion narratives by John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew illustrate the co-existence of traditional and Christian thought and practice as they engaged with missionaries.

In this vein, we recommend David Silverman’s This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). Silverman notes that in early times, Wampanoags “turned the missionaries religion into a new way to express indigenous truths by melding Wampanoag religious concepts and truths with their rough Christian equivalents…some Wampanoags found Christianity to be a means of reinvigorating old religious ideas to meet the stresses of a new era.” (p. 243) There were other practical reasons, of course, to engage with missionaries, and over time, relationships between the two cultures became increasingly strained. By 1677, 10 of the 14 praying towns in Massachusetts were disbanded.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church December 2, 2024

November 19, 2024

This fall, the Episcopal City Mission is offering “A Stolen Beam,” a series of meetings addressing reparations in Christian and Jewish faith traditions. Led by facilitators Steven Bonsey, former Canon Pastor at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston,  and Constance Holmes, the meetings will end in mid-December 2024 and we’ll report on our participation and what we learned from the series in this column.

The course was originally developed by members of the Reparations Committee of the Jewish Community of Amherst, MA. They explain the influence of the Stolen Beam debate on their efforts:

*The name “Stolen Beam” is a reference to a Talmudic debate about the right thing to do when we discover that the house in which we live was built with stolen materials, “a stolen beam.” One rabbi argues that the entire house must be torn down and the beam returned. Another argues that it makes no sense to destroy the home, yet some form of acknowledgment and compensation is owed to the owners of the beam.”

The city of Amherst has been working on a reparations plan since 2021. The final report of the African Heritage Reparations Assembly (AHRA) was issued in September 2023. For more on the activities that led to the presentation of the report, see “Reparations Revisited: Where Are We Now in Amherst?”

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church November 19, 2024