Photo from urbana.org.
The drum was enormous.
They say the drum does not come out for many occasions, but they brought it to the Indianapolis Convention Center this week. They cradled it in a blanket to the center of the tall round stage, unwrapped it, and laid it down at the center.
Seven men surrounded the drum and began to beat, their voices raised in call and response. Among them sat the tribal leader who had earlier been wrapped in a blanket as a gift from the white woman leader. She…

I had the joy of spending a few days in Georgia this week. If you follow the news, you know this about Georgia: on Tuesday the state elected Raphael Warnock in a runoff, expanding the Senate’s Democrat majority.
But that’s not what I’m writing about.
In fact, I’ve been meaning to explain why I don’t write much about news stories at all. If a news story comes and goes and I have not posted my thoughts on it, it’s not that I don’t care, or that the news story didn’t matter to someone or even…

Parker Palmer, an acclaimed sociologist, recently said this about working as a community organizer:
I was not getting people do what I thought they ought to do. Instead at my best I was providing them with excuses and permissions to do things that they wanted to do but were too awkward or shy or fearful to do for themselves.
In the interview, Palmer went on to tell a story of working with a church in a rapidly changing neighborhood. He gave congregants a questionnaire and sent them walking…

Image by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash
This year I returned to a place in South Africa that I called home for several years. One night I sat by candlelight with South African friends John and Penny as we ate perfectly grilled blesbuck, one of Africa’s many types of antelope. John said he likes food that comes with a good story. He’s one of the best story-tellers I know, so I he told us the story of the meat.
You can’t buy blesbuck in a store, he said. It has to be a gift. In this case it…

Do you ever have the sense that history is a grandmother holding out a box of precious treasures, asking, Please will you take these and make something of them in your life?
This summer I visited places where I once lived in South Africa. One Saturday we returned to our favorite farmers’ market and stopped at a booth with tables piled high with used books. My son pointed to one and said, “That looks like it’s for you.”
The title read, THE BLACK PEOPLE and Whence They Came. The yellowed…

This week I had the opportunity to sit in circle with a group of church leaders and formerly incarcerated individuals to talk together about the incarceration system. “It’s like throwing lives in the trash,” someone said.
That line stirred a memory of a time I was first learning what happens when lives are treated like trash. When I got home, I dug out my journal from that time, and I’d like to share the story with you.
It was Christmas Eve, the year 2000. I was working as a substitute…

We have a running joke in my family that when my hair turns grey, I’ll take up birding. In the mean time, my kids make a point of reminding me that I’m aging by periodically giving me bird books, feeders, and bird song CDs.
So I’ve begun learning to identify a few birds. I was walking through the woods one day with my husband, feeling pretty good about myself for recognizing the call of a blue jay, when he suddenly clamped his hands over his ears in a playful but intense response. “No!…

I recently visited a church where congregations speaking French, English, and Spanish come together once a month to worship together. This month West African French-speakers led music. The eldest, a woman in a smart blue dress and crocheted sweater spoke words of encouragement in between the songs. “If you don’t understand the language—hello? What about heaven!” People laughed and I could feel myself shedding layers of the stiffness I’d carried to this unfamiliar space.
We were a holy…