Almost Done Leaves Things Unfinished

Hate the evil and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate.  Perhaps [with us too] the Lord God of hosts may be gracious… Amos 5:15

And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is.  And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass.  Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?  Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?  Luke 12:54-56

We then, as workers together with him, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.  (For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.) 2 Corinthians 6:1-2

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.  Acts 2:1

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“…all the insoluble cruxes like unhappy marriages, race strife, injustice, are not borne by reasoning but by the eternal combination of three irrational qualities: forbearing charity against the perpetrators, flaming defense of the outraged victim, reverence for the inscrutable decree of providence.”[i]

“It’s time for white evangelical leaders to consider the possibility that their own theology and institutions are at the center of the problem. To seriously consider this, white evangelicals need a history lesson and the willingness to finally listen to what Black evangelicals have been saying for decades.”[ii] 

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We live the Lord’s Prayer whether we recite it or not.  Today, now, the prophetic voice of God is beseeching white evangelical Americans not to receive His grace in vain.  Now is the accepted time, the day of salvation for white evangelicals to realize providentially God has set us in a moment when our nation’s racialized past combined with its future divine judgment are shaping the present in accordance with His prophetic word.  Humbly acknowledging this before God would be in accord with Rosenstock-Huessy’s counsel that we give “due reverence for the fullness of time in all its glorious three tenses; not only the future and past, but also their common product, the present.”[iii]  Yielding to the timing of the Lord’s providential rule over America shows Him the respect He deserves.  God is governing our present moment of racial turmoil, conforming it to the impression, which the testimony of Jesus as the spirit of prophecy is imposing upon it.  His doing so creates for us new options for how we may live out the freedom He has given us so that through love we might serve one another in a more excellent way worthy of praise (1 Corinthians 4:5).  

Living to glorify God is never a generic command.  We must know who God is, know who we are, and know where God has placed us.  For the first, we yield to the Holy Spirit, who uses the Bible as a washcloth for washing our hearts and souls, our bodies and minds. This illuminating work of the Lord of life properly prepares us for the Father’s personally revealing Himself more perfectly to us through His Anointed, Jesus our Lord and Savior, made of the seed of David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the eternal Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.  The second, knowing who we are before God, demands we examine our collective identity, which requires examining our collective memories, loyalties and stories.  To be a people of discernment in the timing of where God has placed us we must depend upon the wisdom from above, and this we must want and ask for in faith, nothing wavering.  Walking in truth accordingly, in the present He now is creating, more suitably synchronizes us with His purpose when in the fullness of the times He sums up all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. 

I confess, and for this, I believe, God will judge me, that living by the Spirit and following the Spirit in this American moment of heightened racial tension means serving the living God by cleansing the white evangelical conscience from its dead works historically devoted to the idol of whiteness.  Walking by this truth frees us to enter the fullness of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit in worship and prayer with all the saints. It will make our supplications more effectual, increase godly personal growth, intensify our advocacy for justice, and encourage us boldly to remind the rulers of this age of God’s pending judgment.  The world will know God loves us when, in solidarity with fellow believers of color through the unity of the Holy Spirit in the bond of peace, we in all confidence proclaim and celebrate together the gospel in public without compromise.

Seeing God has so placed us in this moment of His making gives us better understanding of what Rosenstock-Huessy said about the Christian life. “Today as every day, his Spirit demands from us an answer to this question: What is as yet unfinished, uncreated, unprecedented, uncompromised in the vicious circle of our thinking?  And we shall always find that the future of Christianity is present here and now as long as two or three Christians believe in it, and answer.”[iv]  Rosenstock-Huessy gave testimony to the truth, the gospel truth, the living truth corresponding to and demonstrated by the four gospels as “a threefold truth” meaning, “a word may be true in its content; it may secondly be true enough to prove the author right; and finally it may be so true that it forces the next speaker to respond and speak in turn.” This “third aspect of all truth,” is “its forcefulness in begetting a response by changing language.”[v]  All speech, from the most formal public proclamation to the most intimate exchange between two lovers – is the consequence of its primary relational function of communication between God and His children, whom as male and female He created in His image.  Every word we hear or speak however variate or innovative it might seem has its origin in God’s revelation of Himself to us, and our response to Him through worship and prayer.  Whatever we say, regardless of the subject, field, arena, context, or situation fundamentally plays a part in how and with whom we assemble to worship God for presenting our bodies a living and holy sacrifice to Him while offering up a sacrifice of praise, the fruit of our lips that give thanks to His name (Genesis 4:2-10).  Daily God judges each of us accordingly.  Whatever we say is useless unless it ennobles speech unto God’s consummate end.  Jesus said, “But I say unto you, that every idle (careless, useless) word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment (Matthew 12:34-36; 15:18; Luke 6:45; Ephesians 4:29; Jude 14-15).” 

Contemporary white evangelicalism includes an idolatrous and thus, useless, racialized past. Ecclesia semper reformanda est? If we believe God’s grace changes us so we rightly may address the things in the church to be reformed, then in this moment in which He has set us we should rush to repent of that past and root out its continued effects at work in the lives of the saints today. This agenda of reform includes the streamlet of the revival tradition of evangelicalism that flowed through the public ministry of D. L. Moody and settled in the basin of the Moody Bible Institute. It is time the leadership of this northern, trans-denominational Bible school fulfill its moral responsibility of rightly condemning the racial injustices in which the Institute participated.  Historian Dr. Thekla Ellen Joiner sketches the contours of this racialized tradition:

“Revivalism’s implicit yet insistent elevation of the moral standard of whiteness, and its repeated spiritualizing of this moral stance, entailed an inherent criticism of black respectability.  Moral suspicions regarding African Americans were strengthened not by overt statement or blatant discrimination: instead, blacks simply were not part of the moral model.  By undercutting blacks’ spiritual acceptability, this moral standard denigrated their social standing as well.  Even though there was no explicit exclusion of blacks, revivalism’s moral ideology, particularly its elevation of domesticity and the inherent purity of white women, underlay those discriminatory ideas.”

Using the term revivalism synecdochically for whiteness, Joiner describes how it coerced actions counter to the personal feelings of individual white evangelicals such as D. L. Moody. “Even though Moody and many evangelicals may have believed that blacks were spiritually equal to whites, revivalism’s unrelenting portrayal of spirituality as white, middle-class, and domestic belied those more egalitarian beliefs.”[vi]   Her appraisal echoes the assessment made by professor emeritus of history, James F. Findlay, who wrote a generation earlier:

“Even though privately Moody might have been interested in bringing about a degree of racial justice, he could not risk the unpopularity of such a stand in public.  To remain a popular religious figure he had to conform to national secular standards on this social issue, and he did so, accompanied only by an occasional hesitation or guilty afterthought.”[vii] 

The great American evangelist Dwight L. Moody exchanged a sound, biblically based, full-fellowship ministry devoted to building up the body of Christ for an organized enterprise of promotional popularity that supported his business-like method of evangelistic outreach.  By abiding by the color line laid down by white supremacists, Moody facilitated the disfigurement of God’s desired unity in diversity for His saints in America.  Moody avoided the blessing of persecution the Holy Spirit sets aside for the partaking of the saints (Matthew 5:10; 2 Timothy 3:12; 1 Peter 3:14; Revelation 1:9).  He deferred to a spirit of distortion, which mixed racialized hatred in with the faith once for all handed down to the saints.  He failed in following the example of the apostle Paul, who remained steadfast in the face of false charges lodged against him.  Paul was falsely accused of bringing Gentiles into the Temple at Jerusalem (Acts 21:27-30).  Living the fullness of the gift of fellowship the Holy Spirit gives Christians, made Paul susceptible to the charge because he practiced an integrated approach in proclaiming and living the gospel.  This holistic consistency conformed to the teaching the Holy Spirit gave him as he wrote in Ephesians 2.  The blood of Christ united Gentile believers with Jewish believers, forming the two into one new man as one new body, the church, having access in one Spirit to the Father.  Paul lived what he believed and taught others.  He recruited Timothy onto his ministry team, whose mother was Jewish and father Gentile.  Without compromising the Gospel message of salvation through faith alone in Christ alone, Paul circumcised Timothy, confirming his Jewish identity in Christ (Acts 16:1-3). Paul demonstrated Pentecostal fullness of fellowship in Christ by entering Jerusalem with Trophimus the Ephesian (Acts 21:29) and Titus the Greek (Galatians 2). 

Moody did not do this.  He never dared cross the color divide he helped create.  He never organized an integrated approach in proclaiming the Gospel in America.  He never invited black ministers, teachers, evangelists and singers to join him on the podium.  He devoted his ministry to reconciling white northerners with southern whites.  Moody never risked limiting the reach of his ministry by working to integrate white and black Americans in either the church or civil society.  He deferred to those who forcibly divided the body of Christ and segregated America.  D. L. Moody never attempted turning the American world upside down (Acts 17:6).  His public ministry gave refuge to those who reasserted white dominance in the South at the expense of black citizens.  His association with southern ministers, his cultivating of sentimentality over the Civil War and cultivating comradery between white Union and white Confederate soldiers were stock elements in his sermons.  He worked to reconcile Union and Confederate veterans in his meetings. His stories of valor and loss segregated, thus made invisible, the black men who made up ten percent of the Union Army by the end of the Civil War. He held segregated meetings in the South, where the majority of black citizens lived.  All of these stock elements of his public ministry had a share in closing the wound between North and South white America while rubbing salt in the wounds of black Americans.  He went out of his way to advance the dual agendas of both advancing reconciliation among white people from the North and South through communicating the gospel, while sharing the same good news under white imposed conditions of segregation that denied black citizens and black Christians of the blessings and benefits which white reconciliation bestowed.  This did not happen however without white ingestion of the same racialized toxin, whether admitted or not.   

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Eric Foner makes clear that “southern whites did not create their new system of white supremacy alone.  The effective nullification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments occurred with the full acquiescence of the North.  By 1900, the ideals of color-blind citizenship and freedom as a universal entitlement had been repudiated.”[viii]  Historian Mark Noll underscores this point, acknowledging “the willingness of well-known public religious figures like the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, or the temperance advocate Frances Williard to sacrifice black civil rights to other religious goals made their own important contribution to the ‘redemption of the South.’”[ix]  About Moody in particular Noll writes, “Until the mid-1890s, and despite a willingness to speak before black audiences, Moody maintained a policy of segregation for his meetings.”[x] 

Moody’s pragmatic bent demanded promoting, procuring and protecting a successful public revival ministry.  This drive prohibited him from following his heart commanded by the word of God to love one’s neighbor as oneself.  The high water mark of Moody’s criticism of the normative status of whiteness more than his acquiescence to segregated meetings underscores evangelicalism’s propensity for conforming the truths of the Bible to the cultural standards of whiteness.   Late in his ministry career in 1895, Moody impulsively took action in Texas by which he almost tore down the idol of whiteness that spreads the lie black people are intellectually and morally inferior while demanding the hateful practice of keeping them separate from their supposed white superiors.   The American Missionary Association published a record of the event in its periodical the American Missionary.  Describing the “great Moody meetings” held in Texas in 1895, the author presented the incident as evidence that “race prejudice” was “waning among what may be called the more thoughtful people” in the South.  The piece describes how Mr. Moody in a “quiet and yet decided way…removed the [racial] barriers at one of his meetings in Texas.”  Historian Edward Blum refers to the incident in Reforging the White Republic, pointing out that Moody demanded the physical barrier be removed that enforced segregated audiences attending his meetings. Upon removal of the barrier Blum states, “Blacks and whites would no longer have separate seating arrangements at Moody’s revival.”[xi]  Relying upon Blum, historian Gregg Quiggle reaches the same conclusion, writing that after the series of meetings in Texas in 1895 Moody’s “meetings were integrated.”[xii]   

Examining the source Blum relies upon to describe how “Moody openly defied Jim Crow and racial discrimination,” reveals the beauty of Moody’s action but also its unfinished nature.  Blum omits what happened after Moody had the barrier removed.  The next day “when the colored people went to the tabernacle” they not only found “the railing torn away,” but also that their seats had been “moved up near the platform.” Moody had measures taken to keep them warm during the meetings by having “a stove put up and a curtain stretched in the rear to keep out the wind.”  The American Missionary account said, “From that time on colored people flocked to hear the great evangelist.”  Reading the full account makes clear segregation continued, with the seating arrangement for black attendees enjoying a separate but privileged set of conditions.  The writer continues, “But Mr. Moody did not stop there.”  Upon the meeting beginning with this new seating arrangement, Moody altered the program by addressing the black people present.  What the writer said happened next deserves being read in its entirety:

“[Moody] came down and asked the colored people to sing.  So unexpected was his invitation, it caught us unprepared.  The next day I got my choir together and added a few from some of the other colored churches.  The old sexton arranged seats for us and placed an organ there.  At the night service Mr. Moody said, ‘We will now ask the colored people to sing.’  I arose and faced my choir, and the little organ pealed forth as it was touched by the hand of a colored girl, and the choir sang ‘Scatter Sunshine.’  There were about 7,000 or 8,000 people present, all save about 300 were white.  It was a new feature.  The people seemed to be surprised, astonished, excited.  They stood on their feet, they peered over each other.  When we were through singing, Mr. Moody said, ‘Why, it will never do to let them beat us that way,’ and the audience responded with a hearty laugh.  The next day the daily papers said we made ‘fine music,’ and the Dallas News was headed: ‘The Great Moody meetings.  An audience of 9,000 and a colored choir the feature.’  I have not heard of any objection, censure, or anything concerning Mr. Moody’s method.  No paper spoke against the colored people singing, and we sang one song at each service after that.  White and black say such a thing never was done in Texas before.”[xiii]

In response to the new arrangement of privileged segregation, the black choir sang, “Scatter Sunshine.”  The lyrics of the first song sung by the black choir to the white audience take on a haunting meaning when read today:

In a world where sorrow

Ever will be known,

Where are found the needy,

And the sad and lone;

How much joy and comfort

You can all bestow,

If you scatter sunshine

Everywhere you go.

Refrain

Scatter sunshine all along your way;

Cheer and bless and brighten

Every passing day;

Slightest actions often

Meet the sorest needs,

For the world wants daily

Little kindly deeds;

Oh, what care and sorrow

You may help remove,

With your songs and courage,

Sympathy and love.

Refrain

When the days are gloomy,

Sing some happy song;

Meet the World’s repining

With a courage strong;

Go with faith undaunted

Thro’ the ills of life;

Scatter smiles and sunshine

O’er its toil and strife.

Refrain[xiv]

The twice call to courage is especially moving.  Providentially we can hear the first call to courage as a call to the white listening audience to overturn the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws etched in their heart and, going beyond Moody’s personal not liking “this railing business,” with sympathy and love work to abolish America’s caste structure.   The second call to courage exhorts the black believers, reminding them to keep strong in their faith facing the hatred and hindrances rooted in an irrational devotion to the false idol of whiteness. Heard however over a hundred years hence, we know these calls to endearment and endurance have yet to be joined so we may sing together, “How much joy and comfort [we] can all bestow, if [we together] scatter sunshine everywhere [we] go.”

As much as it is true that Moody’s “bold move” in 1895 “was a marvelous turn of events,” looking back at it today it is hard to see this as “a clear stand against racial segregation.”[xv] As pointed out above black people still were required to sit apart from white people, although Moody had their seats moved forward nearer the platform and guaranteed special measures were taken for their comfort. In the providential moment in which these gestures were made, they indicate an anemic hatred of evil and a lackluster love for the good.  The 1890s mark the worst period of lynching in American history.  The lynching of Henry Smith in 1893 was “the founding event in the history of spectacle lynching.”  It was “the first blatantly public, actively promoted lynching of a southern Black by a large crowd of southern whites.”  The public murder performance included “features such as ‘the specially charted excursion train, the publicly sold photographs, and the wide circulated, unabashed retelling of the event by one of the lynchers.’”[xvi]  “Within the lynching of Henry Smith,” one scholar notes, “the repeated reference to eventlike themes, such as a float, carnival, and parade, indicates more that within the act of justice, the structures of entertainment were organized.”[xvii]  Moody’s actions against Jim Crow lagged behind the timing of the Lord insofar as what appropriate action he should have taken when proclaiming the gospel in public without compromise in the face of such horrendous evil.  White evangelicals have been responding late to issues of race ever since with the little done only matching the overlap that accommodates racial equality with white interests. 

Among the reasons for our seeking the truth are ambition, fear, curiosity, guilt, and love.  Only through love however do we truly know the truth.  This is the case because love alone changes our living souls.  Love frees us into rejoicing over the truth we seek to speak so that believers may grow up in all aspects into Him, who is the head of the church, even Christ the Lord.  In its quest for truth about the school’s racialized past, the leadership of the Moody Bible Institute, self-promoted as “the world’s most influential Bible college,”[xviii] might use the 2021 first observance of Juneteenth as a federal holiday[xix] as a moment of opportunity to get in step with the timing of the Lord. 

Remembering like boasting is a social process.  The institution that boasts of scheduling the “Nation’s largest and oldest historical Biblical conference” commits itself to examining collective memories that along arbitrary racial lines misshaped the white evangelical tradition.  Being truthful, thus being changed by the truth, demands the hard work of retrieving and constructing an accountable historical narrative of the racialized memory structurally archived in the life of the Moody Bible Institute since its founding.  Because memory serves as “a key notion with which…groups understand, explain, and interpret their identity,”[xx] like an idol of old, the dominant image of the institute’s past must be torn down, not to destroy the school but to save it.   As the school’s leadership ponders its “response to issues of race,”[xxi] that have marred its past, may God give them a public dispensation of speech for renouncing the hidden things of dishonesty that corrupted its godly tradition.  May God lead them away from walking in the craftiness of racialized superstitions that has impaired unhindered participation in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit among white designated believers in Christ with believers in Christ classified as people of color.  May they commend themselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God to commit themselves to speaking the truth about whiteness with the purpose of restoring the unity of the Holy Spirit, which until now the Institute has yet to preserve in the bond of peace. 

Our Father,

who art in heaven,

hallowed by Thy name,

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Amen.


[i] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future or The Modern Mind Outrun (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2013; previously published Harper & Row, 1966), p. 53.

[ii] Jesse Curtis, “The Roots of White Evangelicalism’s Crisis Are in White Evangelical Churches, Not Republican Politics,” Religion Dispatch (6/14/2021), accessed at https://religiondispatches.org/the-roots-of-white-evangelicalisms-crisis-are-in-white-evangelical-churches-not-republican-politics/.

[iii] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Address delivered before faculty seminar of Dartmouth College (5/22/1940), given as Chapter VIII in I Am An Impure Thinker by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. by Frey von Moltke with forward by W. H. Auden (Argo Books, 2001), p. 93. 

[iv] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, orig. publ., 1946(N.Y.: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 90-91.

[v] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Fruit of Our Lips, The Transformation of God’s Word into the Speech of Mankind, ed. by Raymond Huessy (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2021), p. 111.

[vi] Thekla Ellen Joiner, Sin in the City, Chicago and Revivalism 1880-1920 (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2007), pp. 98-99.

[vii] James F. Findlay, Jr., Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837-1899 (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, orig. University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 291

[viii] Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 131. For black troops in the Union Army during Civil War see Elsie Freeman, Wynell Burroughs Schamel, and Jean West. “The Fight for Equal Rights: A Recruiting Poster for Black Soldiers in the Civil War.” Social Education 56, 2 (February 1992): 118-120. [Revised and updated in 1999 by Budge Weidman.] Accessible as “Black Soldiers in the U.S. Military During Civil War,” Educator Resources, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war. A history work still worth reading was written by Union Army “war of Rebellion” veteran Joseph T. Wilson titled, The Black Phalanx; A History of the Negro Soldeirs of the United States in the Wars of 1775-1812, 1861-’65 (Hartford, CT: American Publishing company, 1887). To learn more about Joseph T. Wilson see Elizabeth Varon, “Wilson, Joseph T. (1837-1890),” Encyclopedia Virginia (n/d), accessed at https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/wilson-joseph-t-1837-1890/. Varon informs the interested that Wilson was honorably discharged from military service after being severely wounded in the back and abdomen in February 1864 at the Battle of Olustee, in Florida. Suffering “excruciating pain, traceable to his wounds sustained at Olustee,” Wilson applied unsuccessfully for a veteran’s pension. “He was buried at Hampton National Cemetery near Fort Monroe, with military honors in a ceremony attended by a large throng of battle-scarred veterans both black and white.” Moody and his public machinery under the spell of America’s social imaginary controlled by whiteness severed historical fact from the make-believe reality it promoted, preventing white evangelicals from seeing the truth of an assembly of “battle-scarred veterans both black and white” gathered to honor a fallen black soldier.

[ix] Mark A. Noll, God and Race in American Politics, A Short History, p. 77.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic, Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2005), p.144.

[xii] Gregg William Quiggle, “An Analysis of Dwight Moody’s Urban Social Vision,” PhD Thesis, The Open University (2010), p. 243.  Accessed at https://oro.open.ac.uk/54492/1/522228.pdf

[xiii] The American Missionary, vol. 49, no. 6 (1895), pp. 220-221.

[xiv] Lyrics by Lanta Wilson Smith (1856-1939).  The melody was composed by Edwin O. Excell (1851-1921). For further information see http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/e/x/excell_eo.htm.

[xv] Edward Blum, Reforging the White Republic, p. 143.

[xvi] Rasul A. Mowatt, “Lynching as Leisure: Broadening Notions of a Field,” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 56, iss. 10 (October 2012), p. 1371.  Mowatt quotes G. E. Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, NY: Panteon Books, 1998),, p. 206-207.

[xvii] Mowatt, op. cit., p. 1371. A portion of the New York Sun description of the macabre ritualized murder of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, 1893: “It was horrible — the man dying by slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh. Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crown of 10,000 persons. The mass of beings 600 yards in diameter, the scaffold being the center. After burning the feet and legs, the hot irons — plenty of fresh ones being at hand — were rolled up and down Smith’s stomach, back, and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat.” “Burned at the Stake: A Black Man Pays for a Town’s Outrage,” History Matters, accessed at historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5487. Source: New York Sun, 2 February 1893. Reprinted in Gilbert Osofsky, The Burden of Race: A Documentary History of Negro-White Relations in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 181-184.

[xviii] https://www.moody.edu/

[xix] “A Proclamation on Juneteenth Day of Observance, 2021,” Presidential Actions, The White House (6/18/2021), accessed at   https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/06/18/a-proclamation-on-juneteenth-day-of-observance-2021/.   Pulitzer Prize historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing/WW Norton & Company, 2021) lays out the importance of the celebration to American cultural and social history.  Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. The technical clinicians of Clio will not be pleased, but Reed’s weaving of personal experience into her narrative of grand events and structural realities literally follows the model by which God reveals Himself in the Bible. 

[xx] Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance, Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 2006), p. 3.  Confino says about the essays comprising this work that they “reflect the shift of the past twenty years in the way historians represent the past: from society to memory, identity, and culture.”  One of the points Confino makes about this change is that the historian now is “a representer of the past (p. 17).” 

[xxi] Dr. Mark Jobe and Dr. Dwight Perry, “Task Force on Race Update,” Moody Bible Institute (8/21/2020), accessed at https://www.moodybible.org/news/global/2020/task-force-on-race-update/.

Published in: Uncategorized on June 22, 2021 at 4:17 pm  Comments (1)