After my Army reservist dad visited a Maine church one summer Sunday during a two-week reserve hitch, he was followed to the parking lot by several church trustees who warned him...

Kalief Browder never should have been locked up. At age 16 he was jailed on charges he stole a backpack because his parents couldn’t pay his $3,000 cash bail. Without ever...

As the only Black student in my high school graduating class, I was accustomed to occasional snubs. Thus, at a recent class reunion, some who shunned me in high school did...

As a young African American child, Anthony Harris, PhD, had few educational opportunities. This was by design. The Jim Crow laws of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, kept his elementary school underfunded and poorly...

Fannie Lou Hamer had nothing else to lose. Born the last of twenty children to sharecropper parents, she grew up in dire Mississippi poverty. She began picking cotton on a plantation...

Dorothy Zellner knew Mississippi would be bad in the summer of 1964. It was a Southern state known for oppressive injustice against Black citizens, but her need to help reverse the...

Psalm 8 recounts one of scripture’s most familiar contrasts. Two ideas cannot be separated: When human beings consider our place in the universe, we are nothing. Psalm 78:39 echoes the sentiment...

Our children and grandchildren live in the four corners of the United States. In the summer of 2020, in a hedge against COVID-induced family separation, we bought a used red truck...

The campground near our Wisconsin cabin is deserted in the winter, but it begins to populate in mid-May. By Memorial Day weekend, people camp by the cool, tannin-colored water. They unfold...

Usually we think of wisdom as something that grows and develops as we age. As we accumulate experiences, we reflect on them, learn from them, and develop new understandings that we...