Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space

This article is an abridged writing from the VLHE keynote address on July 15, 2025.

Good morning to all who are gathered here in faith, conviction, and purpose. I give thanks to Rev. Lamont Wells and the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities for convening this vital conference at Augsburg University. It is a privilege to join educators, theologians, administrators, and community leaders under the theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World.”

I have spent most of my life literally and metaphorically running. From my earliest days on the Southside of Chicago—running from gun-toting street gangs who needed to prove their manhood, from the ubiquitous presence of police, from white boy terrorists, and from powerful clandestine puppeteers who hide behind the curtains of social fiction and set-up, manipulate, and perpetuate the dramas that hold us all in bondage to lies, trickery and postcolonial nightmares. I would add that the compulsion to run is not necessarily a deficiency in character nor is it an attribute that always suggests fear, dread and terror, sometimes it is an intuitive drive to explore new possibilities beyond what is given. Thus, a clear, almost clairvoyant sensibility drives me to the task of returning to running not only as an historical and literary trope, but as a theological and ethical call to a new generation of leaders who will need to wake up every morning on the run! Like the creatures of the African savannah, we must wake up running. The gazelle runs to avoid becoming breakfast for some pride of lions, and the lions wake up running to feed their families. Every creature in the savannah wakes up running because of the precariousness of existence, and so must we. However, there is more at stake than implied in this predator-prey dynamic. We must not run in fear, but in faith towards the Other and the good futures that we can only imagine. This is a decidedly spiritual undertaking at the dangerous and maddening crossing(s) of this moment in democratic life as an ominous cloud of a revived colonial specter of authoritarianism and chaos covers the land like an encroaching fog.

It was Martin Luther King, Jr., who over sixty years ago, spoke to “the urgency of now.” Now, more than then, we need to heed his clarion call “to make real the promises of democracy”¹ in this nation and beyond. We must create communities of discourse and practice that acknowledge our real and distinct differences and yet, seek new ways to live together, and if possible, run together and embrace our differences for the urgent moment at hand. I think this is possible because our religious and social productions of reality are always contextual and constructive. We must, therefore, be vigilant, flexible, and adaptive—we must congregate, conjure and conspire in common(s) at crossing(s) as we “wake up running.”

Running as a Liberative Practice

I employ the metaphor of running throughout this address as a liberative practice for a new generation of leaders on the run. I am playing with and privileging the notion of running as in running away and running to which are encapsulated in the language of “runagate” or “runaway.” According to Vincent Wimbush, the term “runagate” is an alternate form of renegate, from Middle Latin renegatus, meaning “fugitive” or “runaway.” It has come to carry the meaning of a more transgressive act than mere flight. It is marronage, running away with an attitude and a plan, a taking flight—in body, but even more importantly in terms of consciousness, or an awakening to one’s path towards freedom. Thus, I present running as a spiritually liberating practice as we reimagine democratic futures in this season of contested political and religious spaces.²

Religious educators, scholars and church leaders need to begin with the basic consideration that our theological and ethical projects have always been and will continue to arise from lived religious and social experiences, not from the exalted, hierarchical dominance of master classes whose ideological and cultural narratives of supremacy and fascism portend a shadowy and hazardous future for the least of these! Our interpretive and activistic tasks are contextual and constructive, which means that our visions of democracy must resist not only oppressive constructions of deadly theological and ethical discourses but also corporatism and empire that feed on the fears, prejudices, and ignorance of many of our citizens who have been lulled to sleep by vast and complex systems of technology and communication in the name of “America First” and xenophobic beliefs of white supremacist logic and protocol. For this urgent moment when we are witnessing the forced migration of our brothers and sisters, the dismantling of the separation of powers, of religion and state, the building of gulags within and beyond our national boundaries, and the empowerment of a plutocracy where winners take all—we must insist upon diversity, equity, multiplicity, openness, and dynamism. In other words, we must do ethical leadership on the run!

Habakkuk: Running/Watching/Writing

There are two sources or witnesses for my thinking regarding running as an appropriate sign for our time. One is my reading of the 7th century BCE text from Habakkuk 2:2-4 NIV:

I will stand at my watch
and station myself on the ramparts;
I will look to see what he will say to me,
and what answer I am to give to this complaint.
“Write down the revelation
and make it plain on tablets
so that a herald may run with it.
For the revelation awaits an appointed time;
it speaks of the end
and will not prove false.
Though it linger, wait for it;
it will certainly come
and will not delay.
See, the enemy is puffed up;
his desires are not upright—
but the righteous person will live by his faithfulness.

For Habakkuk, there is a deep sense of urgency as the prophet sees the utter devastation of his people under the assault of the Babylonians. He raises a lament, a cry of desperation in the first chapter and asks, “How long will this last?” as he accuses God of not listening and tolerating such gross evil while the enemy hems in the righteous. In verses 2-4 of the second chapter, in a view from the ramparts, he gets a glimpse of the divine response to his complaint in the form of a runner, a herald who carries the vision to the people—a vision that Habakkuk must write down and publish in language that is so plain the people cannot miss it. There is also the caution in the revelation that it will take a while, so he mustn’t give it up! And there is an added note that speaks to the divine activity in this awful moment that calls the prophet and the people to faith that is courage and courage that is faith: “See, the enemy is puffed up; his desires are not upright, but the righteous person will live by their faithfulness.” These words call us to prophetic action—to ethical leadership that is grounded in the Lutheran traditions of grace, justice, and community—as we watch, write, and run to new democratic futures. A young 16th century Augustinian monk heard this ancient word quoted in Romans 1:17 and it ignited a revolution in the Roman Catholic Church that changed the religious and political landscape of Europe and the world. I wonder if we might be so courageous and faithful to God’s call for our world.

The Parable of the Sower

The second witness is from Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, The Parable of the Sower, which tells the story of Lauren Oya Olamina, who is on the run because of the political and social chaos taking place in 2024. She is a runaway, who embodies the role of a bricoleuse, a resourceful individual who identifies available materials and repurposes them for survival. Her go bag, i.e. her runaway bag, like her ancestors’, contains essential items for her journey north. The name “Oya” is derived from the Yoruba goddess of rebirth and life, and Lauren Oya, a young Black woman, leads a small community of diverse individuals through many crossing(s) of destruction and death to new life and possibilities. They rally around common purpose(s), a common(s), which may or may not continue in the future, but they address the precarious moment at hand. Butler’s sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), continues the story in 2032. The Donner Administration disregarded science, and a new presidential candidate named Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot, stirs up a violent movement with his campaign to “make America great again.” The future is uncertain and strange for Butler, but through her protagonist, she believes that acting is necessary.

Both Habakkuk and Octavia Butler place a premium on the practices of running, watching, and writing—presenting them as expressions of a unified consciousness. Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower, urges us to become renegades to the future and to return to the present with lessons on adaptability, change, and pragmatic strategies for liberation from the constraints of bounded consciousness. It also teaches us key leadership lessons garnered from long memory and horrendous suffering, among these are the incredible power of justice, grace, and community that are integral to the task of congregating, conjuring and conspiring in common(s). Moreover, Habakkuk and Lauren exemplify the running/watching/writing prophetic task to which we are called.

So, what might ethical leadership on the run look like for this time? Here I offer some reflections on what might be possible in respect to what I propose as a model for intersubjective communication and embodied practices for transformational leaders on the run. As we make our runs to new democratic futures, we must join Habakkuk and Lauren Oya Olamina on the ramparts where we see the vision; and join them on the ground where we run swiftly to the people embodying the vision in our call to discipleship that I shall call soul-filled-work. Soul-filled-work involves remembering to pack our runaway bags with essential practices for survival and transformation: love-filled-justice, grace-filled-empathy, hope-filled-resiliency.

Ethical Leadership as Soul-Filled-Work

I like to think of ethical leadership as doing soul-filled-work or what the pioneering womanist scholar, the late Katie Geneva Cannon called, “the art of doing the work our souls must have.”³ What is the work that our souls must have? Each of us will have different responses to this question because ethics, nowadays, is a lot like love—it’s a many splendored and splintered thing! But what does your soul cry out for amid what’s going on all around us at this point in the history of our nation and the world? “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me,” says the psalmist.⁴ What is calling you from the Deep? Who is calling you from your innermost sense of self and purpose in the world? What is your ultimate concern? Who and what is calling your name?

The phrase recalls Howard Thurman’s challenge: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”⁵ Ethics is not abstract—it is what we do in response to the call of the sound of the genuine. In one of Howard Thurman’s earliest published sermons, “Keep Awake!” (June 1937),⁶ he tells the story of the Indian musk deer on the run:

It is said that in the springtime the musk deer is haunted by the odor of musk. He seeks it everywhere. There are times when the questing becomes terrible in its agony. He runs over hills, jumping streams and rivulets with his nostrils dilating and his body aching with desire, confident that around the next turning he will discover musk, the object of his quest. This goes on until at last, he falls exhausted, with his tiny head resting on his still more tiny [hoofs], to discover that the odor of musk is in his own hide. “Go where you will from Benares to Mathura; if you have not found your own soul, the world is unreal to you.”

What is the scent in your own hide? What are you searching for on the run? Ethical leaders wake up running!

I think Professor Cannon would want to remind us, however, that the deep, underlying issue in the art of ethical leadership and soul-filled-work is “power.” She asks us to consider how “power” is experienced in a culture that denies one’s existence, erases one’s history and renders them invisible and voiceless. Ethical leadership takes seriously the moral questions of power and justice, but it also calls us to deep spiritual discipline of soul-filled-work and love-filled-justice, as we develop a sense of character, civility and community. It calls us into deeper relationship with our inner lives and public witness and transformation.

Love-Filled-Justice

On the wall facing the entrance to my home study, there is a framed photograph taken by Julian Plowden of a rally during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement at the St. John’s Congregational Church, U.C.C., in St. Louis, Missouri, where the Reverend Dr. Starsky Wilson, now leader of the Children’s Defense Fund, was pastor. The photograph is a colorful and diverse portraiture of congregating. Freedom Riders from an array of racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual, religious, and non-religious backgrounds and organizations found a sanctuary for their activism after the killing of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. St. John’s Congregational Church was a site of congregating for the protests. Upon first observation, the gathering seems a bit out of place with the stained-glass windows depicting biblical figures and stories with prominent characters in the tradition of the Europeans who first occupied the site in 1852 as a mission of St. Paul’s Evangelical Church and relocated to its present home in 1923.⁷ Throughout the crowded sanctuary was an intergenerational gathering of youthful and older adults from different backgrounds, all with clenched fists raised toward the pulpit and choir stand, draped by a white and gold banner displaying a cross and two tethered, rope-bound wrists straining to break free. Underneath the cross are the bold and provocative words, “Reviving Justice.” When I first saw the photograph, I said to myself, “This is congregating! This is love-filled-justice—this is the work that our souls must have!”

Marching, protesting, and assembling in sanctuaries are all manifestations and manifestos of the proclamation of the Gospel that calls us into advocacy and justice for the most vulnerable in our society. However, marching and protests, while necessary, are not adequate for the moment that is upon us. We need to find ways to maintain a sense of wholeness within, as we struggle for change without. In other words, to quote an overused, hackneyed slogan, “We must be the change that we want to see.” But how do we remain sane and whole and not succumb to the numbing social aggregation of market-stimulated moralities that shape and form generations of consumers as ethical capitalist subjects?⁸ This is one of the most profound and nagging problems of our time that has vast implications for the cognitive, affective and behavioral performances of people in leadership roles.

Here Howard Thurman’s call to the inwardness of religious experience or deep-seated spirituality is an essential tool for leaders on the run. It was his insistence that our inner transformations complement our outward quests for change in systems and structures that militate against human and nonhuman flourishing. This means that people who are dedicated to changing barriers that impede the possibility of becoming whole in the world are “under judgment, to make a highway for the Lord in the hearts and market place of [their] fellows.”⁹ The spiritual and ethical practice of inwardness that spirals into the world of nature, people and things involves creative confrontation and transformation of the cultural pattern in which we find in ourselves.¹⁰ While the basic ethical significance of spiritual practices tends to be personal, the vision of the unity of consciousness impels the leader into the world as an agent of change and transformation. Although the overwhelming problems of just human relations cannot be solved by the radical transformation of individuals in society, leadership on the run must be expressed in positive and life-affirming service in society, by “doing the work our souls must have.”¹¹

As we sit, stand and run in the middle of the third decade of the twenty-first century, the rally at St. John’s Congregational points to what is at stake in congregating to create democratic space. We live in a time when the idea of justice has too often been reduced to legal compliance or temporary reform or to no justice at all! But love-filled justice requires more than policy—it demands repair. It demands truth-telling about the structural inequities that have shaped our neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. From racialized mass incarceration to the systematic underfunding of public health infrastructure in marginalized and rural communities, justice cannot be fulfilled without the courage to name and undo the accumulated harm of history.

In the wake of renewed attacks on voting rights, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ dignity, and academic freedom, love compels us to act—not with vengeance, but with moral clarity. Love-filled justice says: We cannot be content with diversity if equity is denied; we cannot be satisfied with charity while systems of exploitation remain intact. This is not about winning a war of ideologies—it is about creating a world where no child is disposable, where no elder is invisible, where the vulnerable are not blamed for their suffering.

In this moment of backlash and regression, love-filled-justice affirms that justice is not retribution—it is restoration. And restoration begins not with slogans, but with deep moral commitments to dismantle supremacy in all its forms—white supremacy, male supremacy, heteronormative supremacy, economic supremacy—and to build democratic spaces where love becomes a spiritual force that informs the political.

Grace-Filled-Empathy

In an era marked by digital disconnection, algorithmic bias, and the mechanization of moral decisions, grace-filled empathy is a radical, revolutionary practice. We are inundated by information but starved for understanding. We know how to simulate emotions with AI-generated empathy tools, but we struggle to sit in silence with another’s pain. Grace-filled-empathy dares to say: I will not only listen to your words—I will feel with you and imagine and work to create a world in which your suffering is no longer necessary. This form of empathy cannot be outsourced—it is our responsibility! It requires disciplined imagination—the sacred act of placing oneself inside another’s story, of refusing to treat strangers as data points or headlines. As surveillance capitalism grows and performative outrage dominates our screens, grace-filled imagination is the capacity to reach toward the human behind the headline, the story behind the statistic.

Empathy, in this sense, is not passive. It is the precondition for moral agency. It fuels the policies we write, the classrooms we shape, the institutions we lead. Without it, leadership becomes transactional. With it, leadership becomes transformational. In addition, we must find and form strategic partnerships and intersubjectively commune with others who are on the run. Running to the future and engaging the present is not a solo act—it involves congregating. Congregating is a collective act of resistance, reconstruction, and reimagining. As the African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”

Like my ancestors, the early runaways and maroons, who escaped and lived along the borderlands and hinterlands, we must find ways to create new communities of discourse and practice where we congregate, conjure and conspire on creating new common(s) as we enter the dangerous crossing(s) of the twenty-first century. An essential spiritual practice in this respect is grace-filled-empathy. Empathy, first and foremost, is a good habit, yet it is more. “It is by grace that we are saved,” writes the Apostle, “not of works lest anyone should boast.”¹² Yes, while we are gifted grace—nonetheless ethical leaders must intentionally practice grace-filled-empathy for others as a way of creating a contagious atmosphere or culture (a moral ethos) on the run. This is the common(s) of our relations with others that also demands hope-filled-resiliency.

Hope-Filled-Resiliency

Hope is not naïve optimism. It is insurgent faith that is courage and courage that is faith. In a world where burnout is celebrated as commitment and despair is marketed as realism, hope-filled resiliency is the strength to stand—not because the path is clear, but because the cause is just.

We are surrounded by what the Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe (a-shele bembe) calls “necropolitics”¹³—a politics organized around disposability, scarcity, and slow death for the marginalized. And yet, people still rise. Still gather. Still congregate. Still dream. The great Maya Angelou wrote: “You may write me down in history, With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt, But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

This is true not only in human affairs, but it is profoundly rooted in nature itself! Attention to the processes at work in living things all around us reveals what appears to be an unyielding intentionality, a daring determination, an inherent resiliency in life itself.¹⁴ In a meditation, entitled “I Will Not Give Up,” Thurman captures what is at stake in the personal and collective struggle of becoming and the search for democratic space on the run. He tells the story of his encounter with what appeared to be deformed trees that somehow had grown above the timber line. He writes: “The steady march of the forest had stopped as if some invisible barrier had been erected beyond which no trees dared move even in single file.” These stunted bushes were really branches of trees that somehow had survived despite their restricted movement. They did not appear “lush”; in fact, Thurman writes, “they lacked the kind of grace of the vegetation below the timber line, but they were alive and hardy.” His further investigation revealed a rather stunning phenomenon: these branches had congregated as vines hugging the ground, developing trees that were different from anything he had ever witnessed. For him it was a statement of the force of life daring to live, not merely surviving, but to live the branches had to reconstitute themselves, which also reshaped their anatomical structure—hardly recognizable as trees (or whatever they were becoming)—they dared to resist existing conditions, patterns, designs and presuppositions about what they were—like a rising from the dead.¹⁵ Thurman exclaims,

What must have been the torturous frustration and the stubborn battle that had finally resulted in this strange phenomenon! It is as if the tree had said, “I am destined to reach for the skies and embrace in my arms the wind, the rain, the snow and the sun, singing my song of joy to all the heavens. But this I cannot do. I have taken root beyond the timber line, and yet I do not want to die; I must not die. I shall make a careful survey of my situation and work out a method, a way of life, that will yield growth and development for me despite the contradictions under which I must eke out my days. In the end I may not look like the other trees, I may not be what all that is within me cries out to be. But I will not give up. I will use to the full every resource in me and about me to answer life with life. In so doing, I shall affirm that this is the kind of universe that sustains, upon demand, the life that is in it.” I wonder if I dare to act even as the tree acts. I wonder! I wonder! Do you? (italics added)¹⁶

Hope-filled-resiliency is not about bouncing back to the status quo—it’s about bouncing forward into new configurations of life. It is the spirit of movements led by those who have every reason to give up but instead declare: We are not done yet. God is not finished with creation; God is not finished with us! From migrant children separated from families to trans youth targeted by legislation, hope insists that we must remain grounded not in what is, but in what can be. This kind of resiliency is not individualistic grit. Like the trees hugging the ground far above the timberline, it is communal determination rooted in sacred memory. It is the fire of ancestors, the laughter of children, the protest songs of people who have refused to disappear singing, “Aint’t goin’a let nobody turn me around…” Hope-filled resiliency tells us that survival is not enough—we are meant to flourish. And in that flourishing, we become signs of another world struggling to be born. I may be fated by political machinations of birth, color, gender, sexual and ableist identifications—but fate is not my destiny! Destiny is what I do with my fate!

The Third Component

This intimate relationship between soul-filled-work, love-filled justice, grace-filled-empathy and hope-filled-resiliency with one another extends into our struggles for eco-justice. Love is not simply an interaction between human beings but is part of the very relationality of life and existence.¹⁷ The existence of Life for humans and other species is part of an unfolding interconnectedness. This understanding of love, justice and hope is grounded in the conviction that the harmony of individuals, communities and the natural world are but separate aspects of a single fluid phenomenon. In a sermon entitled, “The Third Component,” Thurman illustrates the idea of “common consciousness” that makes intersubjective communication, love-filled justice, grace-filled-empathy and hope-filled-resiliency possible. He tells the story from his youth in which he rushed into his cousin’s home and that his cousin gestured for him not to move and to maintain quietness. To Thurman’s surprise, the cousin pointed to his infant child playing with a rattlesnake in the backyard of the home. The child and the rattler, according to Thurman, were having a marvelous time at play. He suggested that this was a for instance of the ways in which “common consciousness” is present as something that is already given in our experience as creatures who are interrelated with other creatures—and by implication, it hearkens back to a sense of community that already exists in which we may participate with other forms of life in harmony, without threat.¹⁸

It is through the third component—the incarnational construction of these new intersubjective connections and the multiplication of spiritual experiences of unity—that we discover that love, justice, empathy and hope that feeds only our communities, and our causes is not sufficient. We must also share our experiences of soul-filled-work with the larger societies of which we are a part—and even the world.¹⁹ These new communities of discourse and practice are rooted in the Gospel call to love and to do justice—to run to the ramparts and see God.²⁰ This is incarnational theology and leadership at its best—it begins at The Table with the body that tastes, touches, smells, feels, hears, knows in ordinary and extraordinary ways of being with the other in love and just relations.²¹ Moreover, it honors fluidity of identities as discursive practices and expressions. Congregating in love-filled justice, grace-filled-empathy and hope-filled-resilience, therefore, takes these difficult and often awkward practices to strategic, yes, even magical, flexible, and constructive tasks of bold, courageous embodied leadership on the run.

Let’s Make a Run for It!

We must make a run for it! We are in good company. Our biblical stories are replete with prophets and others who woke up running and encountered the third component at crossing(s)—those liminal spaces fraught with danger, peril, and possibility. Moses woke up running away from Pharaoh’s House and hid out in the Midian desert until he bumped into a fiery bush at a crossing (s) and returned to Egypt to liberate his people; Elijah woke up running from Ahab and Jezebel after he called fire from heaven on Mount Carmel and hid in the wilderness until Yahweh summoned him to cross the desert near Damascus and appoint a new order of government and religion; Jacob woke up running from Esau and crossed the Brook of Ja-kob where he bumped into a night demon that anointed his future as Israel, the prince of the nations; Rahab, the Canaanite, hid two spies on the run at the crossing (s) of Jericho and her extended family escaped doom by waiting inside a house marked with a red thread; Hagar was on the run crossing the desert of Paran with her infant child escaping from Abraham and Sarah, and was met by an Angel by a spring of water, who told her to return home and promised her that she would become the mother of a great people; David woke up running from the terror of Saul and crossed over into the precincts of Adullam and hid in a cave in the and returned as King of Israel and Judah; yes, even those frightened disciples of Jesus woke up running after the Crucifixion and crossed into their destinies on the Day of Pentecost where a ghost of wind and fire scattered them to the corners of the earth, witnessing and testifying to what they had seen and heard!

Let’s join them and make a run for it! Remember that Habakkuk’s cry of lament ended with a paean of hope:

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
God makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
God enables me to tread on the high places.
—Habakkuk 3:19

Thomas Merton asked in The Seven-Storied Mountain, “What negligence, what delay is this? Run to the mountain and get rid of the slough which keeps you from seeing God.” Let us run to the high places! On the high places we can see the vision more clearly. We are the heirs of the vision of a new kind of community—a beloved community. It is a dream of peace and justice that continues, and no one can claim it as their own until they are willing “to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before their God.” This is not a dream for cravens and cowards who hide behind false justifications for non-action. It is not for spectators who stand on the sidelines and watch injustice and exploitation at a distance. It is not for those vain religionists who bury their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich and pretend that everything will be all right anyway. For when we bury our heads in the sand, we always leave more exposed than is hidden. It is not for greedy and insane puppeteers who hide behind the curtains of social fiction and manipulate the mindscape. It is not for sentimentalists and vain practitioners of a dysfunctional American Civil Religion who wave the flag higher than they wave the cross. It is a dream for those who are willing to join the ranks of men and women who are so inspired by the moral order of the universe and the sacredness of human personality that they are willing to make a track to the water’s edge and to lay their bodies down as a bridge for future generations to travel over into the land of freedom. It is a dream for women and men who are willing to stand alone when the crowds disperse, who will keep on moving against all odds, who refuse to cling to falsehoods and lies that contradict reality, who believe that truth has the final word in this universe, and that justice and love will endure forever.

This is the dream! It is a dream born out of a zeal for peace and justice, nurtured in the praxis of struggle, refined in the fires of persecution, strengthened by the arms of faith, propelled by the vision of hope, enriched by the power of love, and set free by the truth that no lie can endure forever. We are Habakkuk’s heirs. We are the ones for whom he has written the vision. We are the dreamers who must make this world a better place. We are the ones who must run swiftly and prophesy and publish this dream of peace and justice for the peoples of the earth.

Dream on, dreamers! Dream in season and out of season. Dream in the valley and climb to the mountain and see the land of freedom and justice! See what the prophets saw! See what Delores Huerta (wehr-tuh), Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, Jr. saw! If your vision is rooted in justice and truth, there is no power on earth that can nullify its mandate. Politics can’t legislate it, poverty can’t define it, racism can’t destroy it, religious bigotry can’t condemn it, sexism can’t vanquish it, water can’t drown it, fire can’t consume it, death can’t kill it, hell can’t hold it, greedy and insane men can’t prevent it—for it lives in the mind of the One who has said, “Yes!” and no other power in the universe can say “No.” Begin again! Hope again! Struggle again! There is a great camp meeting in the Promised Land! Wake up running!

Endnotes

1. Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream.” Speech presented at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington, D.C., August 1968.

2. Vincent l. Wimbush, “Interpreters—Enslaving/ Enslaved/ Runagate”, Journal of Biblical Literature 130, no. 1 (2011): 5-24.

3. Emilie M. Townes, “Ethics as an Art Of Doing the Work Our Souls Must Have,” in Katie. G. Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, and Angela D. Sims, eds. Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 36-50. For reference to Katie Cannon’s use of the phrase, see Alison P. Gise Johnson, “Fulfilling Katie’s Deepest Desire.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35, no. 1 (2019): 107-108. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/723448. In her first book, she listed three “black womanist virtues”: “quiet grace,” “invisible dignity,” and “unshouted courage” are “virtues” that have been part of practices foreign to the institutional arrangements of powerful elites. Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 86-87.

4. Psalm 42:7.

5. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 1995), xv.

6. PHWT, vol. 2, 34-40.

7. St. John’s Evangelical Church was organized on the north side as a mission of St. Paul’s Evangelical Church. It was first located at 14th and Madison and then in 1923 moved to Grand and Lee, just northeast of Fairgrounds Park. In 1858 ground for their cemetery was first purchased at 1293 St. Cyr in what is now Bellefontaine Neighbors. Historic Buildings Survey, Churches Built before 1941 in Saint Louis County, 1992. Prepared by Esley Hamilton and Judy Little with the assistance of Barbara Bernsen, Daniel Thorn, and Mary Webb Duck for the St. Louis County Department of Parks and Recreation under a grant from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. https://mostateparks.com/sites/mostateparks/files/STLC%20Churches%20Report.pdf, accessed December 13, 2024.

8. Peter Bloom proposes that “neoliberalism strategically co-opts traditional ethics to ideologically and structurally strengthen capitalism. It produces “ethical capitalist subjects” who are morally accountable for making their society, workplace and even their lives “more ethical” in the face of an immoral but seemingly permanent market.” Furthermore, “rather than altering our morality, neoliberalism “individualizes” ethics, making us personally responsible for dealing with and resolving its moral and structural failings. In doing so, individuals end up perpetuating the very market system that they morally oppose and feel powerless to ultimately change.” Thus, Bloom’s argument reveals the complex and paradoxical way capitalism is currently shaping us as “ethical subjects.” We are asked to ethically save capitalism both collectively and personally. Among the ways this scenario plays out is through asking subjects to maintain austerity through financial crisis; to make neoliberal organizations and corporations more “responsible”, “moral” and “humane” for problems that it creates and perpetuates (poverty, social dislocation, health inequity, racial, gender and sexual inequities, etc.); asking individuals to contribute to their families and communities in a globalizing economic culture that works against healthy families and communities. Peter Bloom, The Ethics of Neoliberalism: The Business of Making Capitalism Moral (London: Routledge, 2017), 17. For an historical and sociological review of the term of “neoliberalism” that critically interrogates its labeling as a simple version of laissez-faire economics, see William Davies, “Neoliberalism: A Bibliographic Review,” Theory, Culture & Society 31, nos. 7/8 (2014): 309-317. For a feminist/womanist perspective, see Keri Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

9. Howard Thurman, The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness (Richmond, Ind: Friends United Press, 1972), 124.

10. Ibid. 126.

11. Howard Thurman, “Mysticism and Social Change,” Edens Seminary Bulletin, 1939, p. 29. Luther E. Smith argues that though Thurman can be rightly identified within the pietistic tradition because of his insistence on self-awareness and inner transformation, he had “just as an intense commitment to community, and his mystical experiences were the basis for this commitment.” Mystic as Prophet, p. 10. Martin E. Marty, speaking of Thurman’s contribution in this respect, writes: “He…has shown us how the path of holiness and enlightenment is not merely parallel to but links up with the path of community and action.” “Mysticism and the Religious Quest for Freedom,” Christian Century 100:8 (16 March 1983): 246.

12. Ephesians 2:8-9.

13. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11-40.

14. See Howard Thurman, Disciplines of the Spirit, pp. 13-15.

15. I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life; as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small and in the vast you vastly yield yourself. The wondrous game that power plays with Things is to move in such submission through the world: groping in roots and growing thick in trunks and in treetops like a rising from the dead. Rainer Maria Rilke, “I Find You, Lord,” in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995).

16. Howard Thurman, A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life. Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber, eds. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) 308-309.

17. As he wrote in The Search for Common Ground, “There seems to be a vast, almost incomprehensible interrelatedness tying all together…Man is an organic part of the universe. In his organism he experiences the order and harmony of the universe.” Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground, 31-32.

18. Howard Thurman, The Third Component, Oct. 26, 1958. Running time: 37:49. Thurman discusses the “third component”, or the relationship between two or more entities that is already given and must be discovered or realized. He elaborates with examples of different interactions he has witnessed between people and nature. http://archives.bu.edu/web/howard-thurman/virtual-listening-room/detail?id=340585.

19. Thurman, Creative Encounter, 124. Speaking of his experiences in India from 1935-36, Thurman writes, “We knew that we must test whether a religious fellowship could be developed in America that was capable of cutting across all racial barriers, with a carry-over into the common life, a fellowship that would alter the behavior patterns of those involved. It became imperative now to find out if experiences of spiritual unity among people could be more compelling than the experiences which divide them.” WHAH, 136. [italics added].

20. adrienne marie brown writes: “If love were the central practice of a new generation of organizers and spiritual leaders, it would have a massive impact on what was considered organizing. If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see that there’s no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea—but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential.” adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press), 9-10.

21. Congregating in love is closely akin to “assembling.” According to Day, “assemblage theory rather than intersectionality is better poised to speak of love in political terms as an affective politics, which challenges neoliberal forms of protective disgust based on fear and hatred of difference.” In Day’s earlier work, Religious Resistance: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), she employs queer theorist Jasbir Puar’s theory of assemblage. She argues that Puar’s theory of assemblage “offers a groundbreaking analysis on the limits of intersectionality and how a ‘theory of assemblage’ might help ground an articulation of affective political communities. For Puar, a theory of assemblage suggests a different set of metaphors for identities within the social world such as mosaics, patchwork, heterogeneity, fluidity, and temporary configurations. Within this theory, there is not a fixed, stable ontology for the social world and its multiplicity of identities (as theories of intersectionality assume). Rather, identities (such as race, class, sexuality, gender) are complex, fluid configurations that can properly be characterized as discursive practices and expressions, which means that identities are social constructions generated by material and linguistic conditions rather than ontological assertions. Ibid., 123-124.; See Fluker, TGHS, 260-261, fn57.