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Dear Friends,
I have finally finished filming this week thirteen lectures for a seminary class on Christian Public Witness, and my voice is weak and my throat is sore! But the working part of our journey is at an end, and I can take a “vacation” now.
Things have caught the corner of my eye this week that I should probably write about, but honestly I am too disgusted. I know that politics is a bare-knuckle sport, but it seems like we keep lowering the bar for low blows. Vice President Harris this week threw some punches about Florida’s new history curriculum, essentially taking a single sentence out of 200 pages of material and twisting it beyond recognition, to wit: a comment about how slaves learned important skills that were very useful later now means Governor Ron DeSantis thinks slavery was good! It is so moronic it is barely worth mentioning, I know. But our media class insists on talking about little else—proving themselves morons, I guess.
Never mind that Booker T. Washington (who would know a little something about it) repeatedly emphasized that very point, looking, as he usually did, for silver linings—however remote—in the experience of slavery. But then again, Booker T. would be considered an “Uncle Tom” these days because he believed the answer for the black community was hard work and self-reliance instead of grievance, upon which he built the Tuskeegee Institute. I guess his testimony doesn’t mean much.
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