We Can Change the Story

April 28, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Back in the early 70s, Jesus was big on Broadway. Jesus Christ Superstar andGodspell were both controversial and engaging tellings of the Jesus story that grabbed America’s attention. Suddenly everyone was talking about Jesus. But Tom Key noticed something: the popular stories left out the resurrection. Picking up on the Southern paraphrase of Matthew’s gospel by Clarence Jordan, Key wrote The Cotton Patch Gospel, a musical in which Jesus gets in trouble in Georgia for trying to integrate the church and is ultimately lynched by a... Read more

Freedom Ride 2014: Get on board!

April 25, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

50 years ago, in the summer of 1964, the Freedom Movement in America focused its energies on Mississippi. National civil rights organizations partnered on a Freedom Summer Project, working with local leadership to set up Freedom Schools and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Many of the leaders of that Freedom Summer were baptized in the Movement through the Freedom Rides of 1961. Coming out of Mississippi’s Parchman Prison, they knew that if America was to be born again, change would... Read more

An Earth Day Invitation to Watershed Discipleship

April 22, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Below is an Earth Day invitation from my friend Fred Bahnson, who directs the Food and Faith Initiative at Wake Forrest Divinity School in Winston-Salem, NC. I’m just tickled that they’re hosting another friend, Ched Myers, for a course on Watershed Discipleship this summer. If you want to take issues of place and justice seriously, this is one place to join the conversation. Wish I could be there myself. “We have lost our way as creatures of God’s biosphere,” writes Ched Myers... Read more

NC Clergy Send Open Letter to State Government Leaders

April 20, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

As Jews and Christians across North Carolina celebrated Passover and Holy Week, clergy from our Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina sent the following letter to our General Assembly leadership. Last summer, over 100,000 people came to the General Assembly to protest extremism and call for a new moral center to our common life. As we prepare for another legislative session this year, we pray for those in authority, that they might have ears to hear. Dear Governor McCrory,... Read more

Easter Means Jesus Is Coming to Your House

April 20, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

This morning, while it was still dark, we gathered in the garden at Rutba House to remember the story of that first Easter when the women discovered that Jesus wasn’t in the tomb. “Jesus is risen,” the girls shouted, each in their turn, running across the garden to our little circle. With his new Union soldier hat (fresh from a spring break trip to Virginia), JaiMichael played the sleeping guard by the tomb. We all sang our favorite songs and... Read more

Your Place, Your Parish: A Context for Community

April 16, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

A few years ago, some guys in the Pacific Northwest whom I’d never met invited me to come out and spend a few days with them, traveling from city to city down the West Coast, having conversations about the importance of place. I’d just published The Wisdom of Stability and was glad for the chance to share what I’d learned from monastics and attention science about the importance of place. But by the time we got to the third or... Read more

The View from Below the Cross

April 15, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

On my way into the maximum-security prison that houses North Carolina’s death row, I pass a guard station by the street entrance and look for a parking spot. A middle-aged African-American man in blue uniform pulls out of his spot, and I give him a thankful nod. I’m always surprised how full the parking lot is outside this place where no one wants to be. When I check in at the guard station, I greet the young African-American woman who’s... Read more

Curtis and God’s Cry for Justice

April 14, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Last week I was in a hurry to get from one meeting to another, walking down the street in Walltown on a beautiful spring day. The trouble with being in a hurry in a place where you know everyone is that, well, you can’t really be in a hurry. Curtis waved from his porch and we exchanged greetings. I noticed in his slow and exaggerated movements that he’d already started drinking for the day. For a guy like Curtis, a... Read more

A Conspiracy of Silence? Listen to Our Grassroots Leaders

April 8, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Bob Zellner’s civil rights memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, reads a bit like the Tom Hank’s movie Forrest Gump. A Southern Methodist kid, Zellner just happens to be in college in Montgomery when he wanders over to Dr. King’s church as part of a sociology project. He stumbles into the Freedom Riders, then finds himself taking a summer job at Highlander Folk School, where Rosa Parks got her nonviolence training. Pretty soon he’s on staff with SNCC, nearly killed by the Klan... Read more

Race Baiting and Real Justice In NC

April 8, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

In 1898, when North Carolina’s white establishment was threatened by a fusion coalition that challenged their authority through the power of democracy, our state paper ran stories warning of black men who were ready to ravage white women. The next day, Wilmington’s black owned business burned at the hands of a white mob in the so-called “Wilmington Race Riot.” When 80,000 people–black, white, and brown–marched on Raleigh earlier this year, white men in power again felt threatened, sensing that there... Read more