The Holy Father will be starting his visit to the USA on September 22, 2015 in Washington, DC. (click here)
I want to mention "Years of Living Dangerously" has received an Academy Award in 2014 (click here).
I'll finish up the Pope's Encyclical Letter next week. He is a great man. There is no doubt he is among the most noteworthy Popes of our time.
But, I want to bring focus to a passage from a book written by James Baldwin in 1961 entitled "Nobody, Knows My Name." The New York Times was the only newspaper that reviewed it in 1961.
July 2, 1961
By Irving Howell
Twelve years (click here) ago a young Negro writer named James Baldwin printed an impassioned essay. "Everybody's Protest Novel," in which he attacked the kind of fiction from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Native Son," that had been written in America about the sufferings of Negroes. The "protest novel," said Baldwin, began with sympathy for the Negro but soon had a way of enclosing him in the tones of hatred and violence he had experienced all his life; and so choked up was it with indignation, it failed to treat the Negro as a particular human being. "The failure of the protest novel * * * lies in its insistence that it is [man's] categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended."...
The 1960s was a turbulent time in the USA, but, it produced a greater nation.
"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet it is only when one is able, without bitterness or self pity to surrender a dream one has long cherished, or a privilege one has long possessed that one is set free - That one has set oneself free - For higher dreams, for greater privileges." - James Baldwin
That particular paragraph is appropriate for many, many reasons this week. At this moment in time on Earth a black life from the past mattered and is the best messenger of the change the world is experiencing and the worry about the future.
I want to mention "Years of Living Dangerously" has received an Academy Award in 2014 (click here).
I'll finish up the Pope's Encyclical Letter next week. He is a great man. There is no doubt he is among the most noteworthy Popes of our time.
But, I want to bring focus to a passage from a book written by James Baldwin in 1961 entitled "Nobody, Knows My Name." The New York Times was the only newspaper that reviewed it in 1961.
July 2, 1961
By Irving Howell
Twelve years (click here) ago a young Negro writer named James Baldwin printed an impassioned essay. "Everybody's Protest Novel," in which he attacked the kind of fiction from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Native Son," that had been written in America about the sufferings of Negroes. The "protest novel," said Baldwin, began with sympathy for the Negro but soon had a way of enclosing him in the tones of hatred and violence he had experienced all his life; and so choked up was it with indignation, it failed to treat the Negro as a particular human being. "The failure of the protest novel * * * lies in its insistence that it is [man's] categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended."...
The 1960s was a turbulent time in the USA, but, it produced a greater nation.
"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet it is only when one is able, without bitterness or self pity to surrender a dream one has long cherished, or a privilege one has long possessed that one is set free - That one has set oneself free - For higher dreams, for greater privileges." - James Baldwin
That particular paragraph is appropriate for many, many reasons this week. At this moment in time on Earth a black life from the past mattered and is the best messenger of the change the world is experiencing and the worry about the future.
