March on Freedom Road
What is awakening in us?
Dear Friends,
In the northern hemisphere, spring has sprung at least according to the calendar. Kaitlin Curtice observed on her instagram last week that for her and other Ashinaabe folks, it’s officially the new year.
It makes a lot of sense to observe the new year as things are coming back to life rather than in the middle of winter. Green is pushing up from the ground all over in places where it had gone dormant. Seemingly from nowhere the brown leaf litter, damp and decaying, is now overshadowed by ferns unfurling their spirals and tiny flowers lifting their many-colored faces towards the sun.
What is awakening in us? What new thing is springing to life? Is there a new season to be embraced?
Podcast Episodes:
Our guests this month have been fire!
A new vision of public safety is possible. Listen now to Jami Hodge and Lisa on our podcast discuss a better future for all of us and how we can dismantle the systems of (in)justice that we currently are living with:
“I went in thinking the system was broken. It has been through growth and experience that I've learned that it's actually not broken. It's working as it was intended. That's what the lens of history helps us to conclude.” —Jamila Hodge
Listen now on our website or wherever you get your podcasts!
If you’re a paid subscriber, listen in on an exclusive behind-the-frontlines conversation here:
(or if you’re a Patreon patron, click here).
Then later on in the month we learned to say, “I’m too sacred for this!” with Christena Cleveland. Lisa and Christena explored what it means to decolonize our faith, and Christena shared about the revelations she had on pilgrimage searching for Black Madonnas.
“For many of us, our actual salvation was on the line. That's how we understood it.
And so I had to die. You had to die to your blackness in order to be saved. When you think about that in its gravity, it is genocide.” —Christena Cleveland on the Freedom Road Podcast
Listen now on our website or wherever you get your podcasts!
Or for our paid subscribers we have an exclusive behind-the-frontlines conversation here:
(or if you’re a Patreon patron, click here).
On the Freedom Road Substack:
We need more Don Quixotes by Steve Wright
Education is machine, contorting children into the shapes we want them to be. Education reform is drones: complicitly operated from district offices, dropping jargons on moss covered windmills that grind our children into dust.
We need more Don Quixotes. More absurd romantics spewing fusillades of illogical Love at the cold efficiency of machine. We need more absurd teachers riding tricycles, pedaling poorly, knees bumping the long, pointy lance tucked neatly under my arm.
Read the rest:
Lisa’s Adventures
Lisa participated in the Samuel DeWitt Proctor conference which took place in Atlanta, GA last month.
Lisa’s publisher gifted each participant with a copy of Fortune: How Race Broke my Family and the World… and How to Repair it All.
Lisa shared from her family's story and her own story about the need to decolonize our faith: and what that will take for us as people of faith of African descent.
Ancestry.com will be releasing a social media ad featuring Fortune soon!
Lisa is also a part of two different gatherings that are doing deep thinking on white Christian nationalism and its impact on the church, one of which takes place at Oxford University.
For more on Fortune and ancestry and how it impacts us, check out this video from this past MLK day featuring Lisa and a discussion of Fortune:
Consulting Work
Freedom Road is excited to have been working with Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), which is a pillar church in the greater Philadelphia area. It has been an absolute joy to work with their leadership and anti-racism task force strengthening the work of racial equity and justice in their congregation
In February, we launched our work with the Carter Center to move institutions forward in the work of truth seeking, truth listening, and truth telling.
For more about what we do in consulting for organizations,visit our website.
Global Writer’s Group
Since April of 2020 as the world closed down, the Global Writer’s Group has been meeting via zoom every Saturday, with time off only for Christmas and New Years. Early in our time together, Lisa Sharon Harper charged the group with the task of “writing a new world into existence” and over time we have truly seen this in action. We have taken on the task of changing the world, and of course what changed first was ourselves. We as a group have become better writers over this time, but also better people, finding true community in the sacred sharing of ourselves with each other and the world.
We accept members on a rolling basis: it’s never too late to join the community. Prepare to find your life changed for the better as you sharpen your writing skills and prepare to bring your words to the world.
Collectively, we have published six books and many, many journal articles over the past three years with several more books in the works.
The Narrative Gap, as coined by Lisa Sharon Harper, is the distance between the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, including how we got here and what it will take to make things right. In our world today, competing narratives vie for our loyalty, dividing society and the church, therefore making justice impossible. Our mission is help communities shrink the narrative gap, by identifying core issues and building community capacity so they might work toward common solutions for a just world. Here on the Freedom Road Substack, we can converse together on ways to shrink that narrative gap and help ensure everyones’ stories are told.
Connect
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