An Old Emergence

Today we honor the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a life lived in peace, and a life spent working toward equality. Dr. King remains to this day an inspiration for all who still struggle for equal rights. Growing up in Alabama endows a white Anglo-Saxon protestant with a unique perspective on race relations. Even though I never experienced segregation or the atrocities that were perpetrated in my home city of Birmingham in the sixties and seventies, I still experienced a form of “us-them” mentality as a child. I remember thinking and “understanding” that there was something different about the black, Asian, and Latino students in my classes.

An insightful reflection from Rev. Diana Butler Bass in response to the shooting that occurred this morning in Arizona involving Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Follow the link HERE .

I’ll be honest. My original intent with this blog post was to rant about the efforts of an Auburn University professor to publish a new edition of the Mark Twain classic Huckleberry Finn . This new edition would replace the word “nigger” with “slave.” To be sure, I find the “n-word” incredibly offensive. However, by censoring the use of this word in a classic work of literature takes away much of the meaning and cultural context of the original work.

(if you missed part 1, you can check it out here) I am resolved to do things differently this year. I am finding out that I have a fair bit of time on my hands post-graduation, pre-working. While I anticipate having a job of some sort secured by next week, I will still have a significantly larger amount of time on my hands than when I was in school. So I'm going to be intentional with my time.

I really hate making New Years resolutions. I’ve done it before, but they have never amounted to anything worthwhile. My resolutions have always been somewhat trivial, intensely focused on making me better than I was before. It’s a bit of an unhealthy cycle. But not this year. This year I am standing at a crossroad. The finale of 2010 was exceptionally difficult for me. I graduated from college, finishing up four and a half years at a place that transformed my life. I moved back to Hoover, leaving behind a life that I had spent half a decade building. I left a church, and for the first time in my life doing so was devastating because I loved the church, not because I had been betrayed by it.