February 17, 2025

During Black History Month, we invite you to read some of the works written by authors speaking to the next generation. Our suggestions include:

–Langston Hughes’s poem, “Mother to Son” (first published in 1922 in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); in 1926, the poem was included in his Hughes’s poetry collection, The Weary Blues)

–James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew” (published as “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” in The Fire Next Time (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013)

–Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019). Perry offers a layered meditation.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015)

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin

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 5, 2024.