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Writer's pictureThe Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples

Sunday November 24, 2022 10:30am - Eisenstadt's Against the Hounds of Hell

Updated: Nov 22

Dear Engaged Spirituality Family,

 

We have been truly blessed by the presence of Peter Eisenstadt, the author of Against the Hounds of Hell, for the first 2 Engaged Spirituality sessions on his book. If you would like to send your appreciation, just email me and I will forward your thoughts onto Peter. Next we will continue our discussion of Against Hounds of Hell. We will discuss the Chapters 12-15 pages 274-394.

 

Engaged Spirituality will next meet on:

Sunday, November 24, 2024

at 10:30 AM-PT, 11:30 AM-MT, 12:30 PM-CT, 1:30 PM ET


Chapter 12: Disciplines and Resources: At Boston University

"Of all of Thurman’s major jobs, the one he liked least was Boston University. It is a bitter irony that this lifelong supporter of interracialism did not find his one experience working within a white institution to be very satisfactory. His comments on his work at Boston often convey a sense of exasperation and exhaustion."


Chapter 13: "The Stillness of Absolute Motion": The Wider Ministry

"During Thurman's first year of the Wider Ministry, he had to sort through two hundred speaking invitations.... In his annual report he noted that he gave 'primary consideration to whose which would provide the best opportunity for experiences of unity across [racial, ethnic or religious] lines,' with a special emphasis on Black institutions in the South. But not all of his efforts at racial unity involved African Americans."


Chapter 14: Common Ground? Coming Around? "The Cataclysms of the Civil Rights Revolution"

"Thurman's statement that "community cannot feed for long on itself" is Thurman at his most eloquent, a succinct summary of his entire social philosophy. But those who had read The Search for Common Ground from the beginning would have recognized that in saying this, Thurman was not just offering a metaphor or a striking observation. It was, in some ways, for Thurman, a simple biological fact. "Community" too, properly understood, was a living entity. It was alive. In The Luminous Darkness he had written: “The burden of being Black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare in our society to express oneself as a human being;” and to be human “the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds  him ethnically, 'racially’; or nationally.... [H]e belongs to the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived… to be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world."


Chapter 15: With Head and Heart

"Thurman experienced the American century's heights and depths, knowing that, to paraphrase his beloved Psalm 139, God was present when America tried to ascend to the heavens, and present when it made its bed in hell. In his democratic vision, all people were infinitely equal; in his world, boundaries were just line drawn on a map and religious creeds just words written in a book; in his universe everything was alive, connected and filled with divine sparks. He wanted us to hear the small, urgent voices within, and to listen to the clamor of the disinherited without. He was not cowed or intimidated by the vicious contradiction of American life, which he tried to understand and change but neither minimized or excused. Those touched by his message must continue to oppose humanity's most tenacious and implacable foe, our voluntary imprisonment within our fears, our lies, and our hatreds, Let us take up Howard Thurman's battle against the hounds of hell."


Attached are the notes for Chapters 12-15.

 

Take care,

Eileen






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