Artist’s portrait of Sojourner Truth’s meeting with Abraham Lincoln in 1864 (Photo by MPI/Getty Images)
This is the second of a two-part article on Sojourner Truth, the 19th century preacher, orator, anti-slavery, and women’s rights activist. Born a slave in Ulster County, New York, she was never afforded the opportunity to learn to read or write. Yet, through fearless determination born of a deep Christian faith, she became one of the brightest lights in the civil-rights and women’s rights movements of the 19th century, lecturing and speaking to thousands, and meeting with some of the most influential figures of the period, including three presidents. Continue reading Sojourner Truth Part 2: Woman of Influence→
While researching the life of the nineteenth century itinerant preacher and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, for an upcoming blog, it became extremely clear that many of the giants of the abolitionist movement in the United States had a strong Christ-centered faith. Sojourner Truth was a lay preacher. The famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman—the Moses of her people—both had a strong faith in Jesus Christ. The relationship between the Black Church and the fight for freedom continued into the 20th century, where the church and the Civil Rights Movement remained practically inseparable.
How is it then that those for whom life has been so extraordinarily difficult and unfair, by any stretch of the imagination, could have had such an unwavering belief in God—in Jesus Christ, specifically? Simultaneously, the loudest voices advocating atheism—of a belief in no God–tend to come from men and women of privilege, particularly from academia? The search for an answer to this question precipitated this post. Continue reading The Luxury of Atheism→
The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work —Archbishop Oscar Romero, November 27, 1977 [1].
Archbishop Oscar Romero (1917 – 1980) at home in San Salvador, 20th November 1979.
We follow the nun down a narrow street as her habit, a shimmering, heavenly white, flutters in the breeze. She opens what appears to be a large, old, wooden door. Inside is a small courtyard. She gestures to a wall covered with numerous plaques dedicated to the late Archbishop, Oscar Romero. “These plaques were on his grave because people asked for favours from God through Monsenor,” she says. She leads us to a library, where his homilies are kept, as well as four pastoral letters, and his identification cards.
The Carmelite nun is demure but her smile, as well as her voice, is fixed with a resolve and a gentle confidence as she describes the home of the Archbishop. “Here is his bedroom,” she says. We enter and the camera pans right and reveals a small bed, a cot, really, against the wall. “He would offer this little bed to visitors to stay the night. He would tell them ‘Stay the night, don’t leave this late! The neighbourhood is a bit dangerous. You could get mugged. I will sleep in the other room. I have my hammock.’”
In another corner, under a window, there is a tiny desk with a washed-out green IBM Executive typewriter, a cassette recorder that resembles a portable radio, and a telephone. “On that typewriter he wrote all his documents, his homilies…and he recorded his diary every night on that tape recorder.”
