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My Year With Books (And Burnout)
Back in August, a friend gave me a copy of Percival Everett’s recently published novel, James, in which the author retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the vantage point of the enslaved Jim. Early in the book, as James is beginning his unlikely attempt to reunite his family, he and Huck stumble onto a robbers’…
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How much to say in 2024? How loudly to say it?
How helpful is it to publicly oppose the MAGA-Trump movement in 2024? I’ve been wondering about this and am struggling to come up with an answer I feel much conviction about. It feels like a lot of people, for a variety of reasons, believe it is necessary to take a vocal stand against the former…
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Where Was the White Church?
A lightly edited version of a talk I gave at a conference at Progressive Baptist Church here in Chicago. On a November Sunday in 1898, the Rev. Francis J. Grimke stood before his congregation at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington D. C. Rev. Grimke had been born into slavery in South Carolina, the…
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The Language and Culture of Shalom
Marcus Briggs-Cloud is a linguist and the co-director of Ekvn-Yefolecv, “an Indigenous ecovillage community in Weogufka, Alabama comprised of Maskoke persons who have returned to their ancestral homelands to practice linguistic, cultural, and ecological sustainability.” Years ago he resolved to revitalize the language of his people before it completely died out. The Maskoke people depend…
David W. Swanson
Pastor and Author
David W. Swanson 