This Pope is allright with me. Love his fierce integrity. Love his comfort in being his natural self. Love his courage and strength in refusing to take on the Catholic Church's usual attachment to lavish props, drama and conspicuous demonstrations of wealth and power. I really love how he gives his time, and of himself. I'd say that wherever he goes, he seems to spend more time with the less fortunate people of society, than with the rich.
Did I mention how happy his interpretations of Spiritual Truth make me? In particular as he's taken on traditional mores in today's world, the openness he's bringing to his Church and the world is just awesome.
Today, most people no longer listen within themselves for guidance as to how to live their lives, and relate to others in the world. So religious leaders provide that authority ~ which really belongs to the individual and his connection with 'The Divine'~ as to how to define themselves, think, act, and BE.
Pope Francis is especially refreshing after the previous pope's small, tight, dogmatic and forceful enforcement of an outdated perspective and rules, left so many in desperation. The previous pope did not realize that the collective human consciousness has evolved and eclipsed the dogma and limitations he and the leaders of other world religions are still trying to impose on their followers and other human beings. Pope Francis gets us back on a road that's based enough on respect for nature's order, and encompasses an understanding that as the Universe is expanding, so must humanities' idea of God or as I love to call It, Cosmic Consciousness. And expand too, must our ability to transform into greater loving, kinder creatures. So I feel Pope Francis' value is that he's directing us again to paths that will allow us to realize our potential as living human Beings, that are a part of the oneness of this Earth's life. I'm going to give him a pass for canonizing that California plantation owner, Junipero Serra, who enslaved and oppressed the indigenous people of my home state. The program and system he put in place, makes him responsible for the genocide of millions of the regions native people. His actions are too questionable, and were a cause of too much pain, for him to be considered a saint. Back to Pope Francis ~ I love his sweet smile, his matter of fact truth telling, and his humility. I've also discovered, that I love seeing him laugh. I'd love to hear it's sound. lovu, Kendke Sometimes these formats don't adhere to my layout so be sure to scroll to next post to see all.
Pope Francis Couldn't Stop Laughing as He Blessed a Baby Dressed in a Little Pope Outfit
John Boone
September 28, 2015
Pope Francis has met a lot of very important and impressive people
since he touched down in the U.S. for the first time ever last Tuesday.
But his favorite might just be the baby Pope he met on Saturday in
Philadelphia.
Quinn Madden, dressed as a little, baby Pope, was in the crowd when Pope Francis did a blessing tour of Ben Franklin Parkway.
When
Pope Francis saw her from his popemobile, he immediately burst into
laughter and adorably couldn’t stop as he blessed her from afar.
Then,
one of the pope’s security officials came over and brought Quinn back
to him, where Francis gave her a kiss and whispered a message to the
guard.
Quinn’s father, Daniel Madden, said, "He told his security guard to tell us that we have a great sense of humor.”
The
judges of this year’s Man Booker Prize have produced the most racially
diverse shortlist in its 46-year-old history. Of the six handpicked
authors, there are four writers of colour: Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria),
Hanya Yanagihara (US), Marlon James (Jamaica) and Sunjeev Sahota (UK).
Anne Tyler (US) and Tom McCarthy (UK) complete the list.
For much of its history, the Man Booker Prize has been contested by resoundingly white and male shortlist candidates.
Over the last four decades, six of its 46 winners were authors of
colour and, out of the 13 female winners, only two were from minority
backgrounds. Diversity, be it in ethnicity or gender, is not the British
award’s strongest point.
Yet
the presence of just two white entries on this year’s six-man shortlist
may signal an acceptance of the variety, shades and cultural
understandings within the discipline of English literary canon.
Before the winner is announced on October 13, become acquainted with the shortlisted writers of colour with this round up:
Chigozie Obioma: The Fisherman
Despite
being the youngest member of the shortlist, Obioma has created an
accomplished debut novel, prompting some to name the 28-year-old as the
heir to Chinua Achebe.
Set in Nigeria in the 1990s, this coming-of-age tragedy follows four
young brothers embarking on a fishing trip during the absence of their
strict father. There they meet a man who prophesizes that one of them
will kill their eldest brother, Ikenna. While the elements of tragedy
and the inability to avoid one’s fate underscore the prose, it is the
eventual turning of brother against brother that makes the novel a
clever allegory for post-independence Nigeria.
Yanagihara’s
stark book is favourite to win the prize. Her second novel follows the
lives of four 20-something friends starting new lives in New York. While
all the characters have had difficult lives, it is the most successful
out of the four, Jude, who stands out. Having endured horrific abuse as a
child, Jude seems unable to surmount the trauma of his earlier life.
His habitual self-harm, which causes him to lose the use of his legs and
create a body riddled with scars, tests the limits of both the men’s
friendship and the reader’s resilience in what has been called a grim,
psychological tale of enduring friendship and unescapable gloom.
James
third novel is an exhilarating 700-page epic anchored around the 1976
attempt to assassinate Bob Marley. From there the story springboards to
Jamaican politics, gang wars in the ghettos of Kingston, race, class,
poverty and the CIA’s efforts to destabilise the country’s government in
the 1970s. The book is a darling of the literary critics and there is
even talk of A Brief History of Seven Killingsbecoming a TV show for HBO.
Despite the Booker Prize having always being open to English literature
from Commonwealth nations, James became the first Jamaican national to
win a nomination for the literary prize.
Sahorta’s
novel humanises the people so often demonised in Britain: immigrants.
The Derby-born author, who won Granta Best Young British Novelist in
2013, has created a lyrical epic that follows the life of three Indian
men sharing a dilapidated house in Sheffield and one British Indian
woman. Flitting between their memories of being back in India and their
experiences of the UK, the reader witnesses the men’s realisation that
life in Britain can be harder and crueller than the homes they left
behind. As Kamila Shamsie says in the Guardian: “This is a novel that takes on the largest questions and still shines in its smallest details.”
All
work published on Media Diversified is the intellectual property of its
writers. Please do not reproduce, republish or repost any content from
this site without express written permission from Media Diversified. For
further information, please see our reposting guidelines.
Tara
John is a freelance journalist and the Arts & Culture Editor at
Media Diversified. Her work has been published in TIME Magazine, The
Straits Times, The Times and NDTV. She was formerly the Web Editor of
Time Out Singapore and worked at Reuters as a sub-editor on the Global
Pictures Desk. Say hi to her on twitter @tarajohn
I found this email with a recent post from a blogger I've found interesting and worthwhile. Abagond's excerpt from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time reminded me how my soul rejoices in coming in to contact with his truth. Of course, I read many of his books years ago. Today whether it's listening to a recording of him speaking, or running across one of his many profound quotes, his relentless practice of speaking from his integrity always nourishes and strengthens my sense of self.
So I searched for a bit more of Baldwin, and found another article on his life with wonderful pictures. It's also included below.
I have a dear friend, who's asked me about the possibility of my limiting the length of my posts, and the amount of information presented here. Basically my friend would like me to make these posts shorter. I explained that I'd try but that this blog is not about sound bites, and dropping bits of information, but, about offering us all a chance to slow down, and give ourselves an opportunity to cultivate deeper understanding. I'm not into instant, quick, abbreviated and partial knowledge. I've also added images and occasional music, that your stop here, will be a pleasure which you might look forward to. If these moments are enjoyable, hopefully they'll encourage you to take the time that you need to enjoy the things that you really like, and you've decided are of value to you. Society has programmed us to NOT do that, and to only dance to the dictates of someone else's clock, schedule, preference, agenda. I simply want to be your hostess, at the "oasis at Meroe West", where you indulge your True Self's feelings of fulfillment.....That's one of the meanings in the message of the song "Sometime" I've added to this mix for your pleasure. So grab a cup of your favorite beverage, select a comfortable seat, and bask in the ray of Blessed James Baldwins' light. Know that all of your labors to live as your True Self, keeps your own spirit elevated. Sometimes we feel our efforts go unwitnessed and make no difference, but they transform the world, and keep you in the flow of Life's radiance and goodness. appreciate & lovu so much ~ Kendke
You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it.
They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death. But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
Take no one's word for anything, including mine - but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.
By a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are loosing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers - your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.
"The very time I thought I was lost,
My dungeon shook and my chains fell off."
We cannot be free until they are free.
- James Baldwin, 1963, adapted from the letter to his nephew that appears at the beginning of "The Fire Next Time".
Tell Me How Long James Baldwin's Been Gone by ALEX CARNEVALE
Before James Baldwin
made his first ever trip to the American south in 1957, the
Harlem-bred prodigy flew to Washington D.C. to talk to the poet
Sterling A. Brown. Where Baldwin's work continues to be read in schools
and to a certain extent by the general public, Brown's distinguished
career is relatively anonymous outside of appreciators of the master
poet.
Before reporting on the civil rights conflict for Partisan Review
in an article that would be called "Nobody Knows My Name," Baldwin got
a rough guide from his mentor on what to expect in his first
destination, Charlotte, North Carolina. Brown reminded Baldwin that
blacks in the South might resent or fear him, and in David Leeming's
biography of Baldwin, he quotes Brown as telling Baldwin "to remember
that Southern Negroes had endured things I could not imagine."
Cooking in 1966 in Istanbul
It
is strange to think of Baldwin alive in the world today, walking
around in the world he made instead of the one in which he was made.
Born in August of 1924, Baldwin's early life in Harlem would later be
chronicled in one of the great first novels ever written, Go Tell It On The Mountain.
The ostensible subject was Baldwin's domineering reverend stepfather,
but the book was to a greater extent Baldwin's declaration of himself
as the ultimate outsider.
Initially titled Crying Holy, Mountain
established Baldwin's reputation as an emerging talent in world
literature. Written in Paris during the first of Baldwin's exiles, the
book is almost incomprehensible to young people today, and it was only
assigned reading in my ninth grade class because by the grace of God my
English teacher never shaved her armpits and told me that referring to
Macbeth as being "whipped" was both sexist and inappropriate. Baldwin
himself was quickly identified as a gifted student, and he attended
high school at De Witt, the legendary Bronx school, after a
recommendation by early mentor Countee Cullen.
With Engin Cezzar in Istanbul 1965
At De Witt, Baldwin's classmates included the likes of Richard Avedon, Sol Stein, and Emile Capouya.
Still living in Harlem with his family, Baldwin developed a second
community, mostly composed of Jews, where he felt at home. This was a
crucial step for the young writer, who was for the first time
investigating his sexuality. Although he was very gay, Baldwin had
relationships with women throughout his life, the vast majority of which
consisting of mothering and unwavering financial support.
With biographer David Leeming (glasses) and others
Because
of his fearsome stepfather, though, the men in Baldwin's young life
loomed large. His friends were numerous and bold-faced: Marlon Brando
once paid Baldwin's way back to American after an aborted attempt to go
stay in Tangiers with Paul Bowles.
His connections with the major names in black literature were more
fractured. He would resolve to work harder than his predecessors on
relationships with the next generation of writers. As Toni Morrison once
put it in a remembrance of her friend: I
suppose that is why I was always a bit better behaved around you,
smarter, more capable, wanting to be worth the love you lavished, and
wanting to be steady enough to witness the pain you had witnessed and
were tough enough to bear while it broke your heart, wanting to be
generous enough to join your smile with one of my own, and reckless
enough to jump on in that laugh you laughed. Because our joy and our
laughter were not only all right, they were necessary.
By
the time Baldwin was ready for the first trip to the south, he had
already felt the lax racism of Paris, where many African-American
expats went to gather, including Baldwin's major nemesis/foreunner, the
novelist Richard Wright. Baldwin's third piece in the fledgling journal Commentary was an attack on Wright
called "Everybody's Protest Novel." The two argued about writing for
the expediency of a political cause, and Baldwin ended up feeling
uncomfortable under Wright's gaze.
Embracing Lena Horne
When
he had first arrived in Paris sometime after his 24th birthday, his
welcoming party had included Wright and Jean Paul-Sartre. Returning
there later in life, he saw Paris as an escape from the literary
culture, and perhaps more importantly an escape from America, where he
could be James instead of standing in for someone's idea of him. Still,
he did not always find Paris as welcoming as he had hoped, although he
once said that at the time, he never intended to return to America.
The publication of two of his essays on the subject of race, collected in The Fire Next Time, thrust Baldwin into a very public position while he toured the country. These broadsides had run in consecutive issues of The New Yorker, and Baldwin appeared on the cover of Time in 1963.
In
one sense, this represented a kind of progress, a shifting of the
debate. It was also a double-edged sword, as Baldwin deftly noted in the
introduction to his collected essays: But it is part of the business of the writer — as I see it — to
examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From
this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not
only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite
possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is
to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You
taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I
know how to curse.") ... Nevertheless, social affairs are not
generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be
or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself
and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity,
so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must
first be allowed to take a long look back. In the context of the Negro
problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own,
have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all
that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will
remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
Baldwin was the man of his family now, the world traveler. He feuded with William Faulkner
over Faulkner's declaration that he would fight in the street with
his racist friends if it came to it. Faulkner's advice to the civil
rights movement was to "go slow." Baldwin responded in his essay
"Faulkner and Desegregation" by quoting Thurgood Marshall's comment
that "They don't mean 'go slow.' They mean 'don't go.'"
This
is a world we cannot recognize, and Baldwin actually had to answer for
why he wanted equal rights so badly! He concluded his appraisal of the
Mississippian by writing "There is never a time in the future when we
will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time
is always now."
James
Baldwin, Joan Baez, and James Forman (left to right) enter Montgomery,
Alabama on the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights, 1965.
He
did so, obligingly, definitively, eventually impatiently. He
remembered Sterling Brown's advice, and his work about race was usually
addressed to whites, aiming to convince them delicately, forcing them
to convince themselves, really. For his style and manner he was
sometimes reproached by his peers, including Malcolm X, who represented
at least something of the religious officiousness that Baldwin had
rejected in his youth. All that time he told us how difficult it was to
want be a part of something he was convinced with absolute certainty
could never be.
Faulkner
refused an invitation to the White House that would have put him and
Baldwin in the same room. He was of an ilk of white man whose objection
to other people's objections was that they made it all about race.
This is not to say something about Faulkner, but ourselves. Even now,
when someone argues that an issue has eclipsed race, we can hear
Faulkner's words to American blacks in theirs, and know it for a lie.
With the painter Beauford Delaney "Peepsie"
With Nina Simone
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan.
Queen Quet Marquetta Goodwine is the queen mother, chieftess and spokesperson of the the Gullah Geechee Nation in the southeast United States[Allison Griner]
The cicadas' song is rising with the midday heat, and Queen Quet Marquetta Goodwine flits from one canopy tent to the next. The fish fry is well under way. There are guests to greet, conversations to be had, and help to offer.
Tall, with a head crowned with cowry shells and robes that flow to the ground, Goodwine looks every bit like a head of state. And that is in part because she is one. The Gullah Geechee Nation in the southeast United States elected her as its head pun de bodee: its queen mother, chieftess and spokesperson.
A self-declared "nation within a nation," the Gullah Geechee people are the descendants of African slaves, isolated on the coastal islands stretching from north Florida to North Carolina.
Their ancestors combined west and central African traditions to create a culture entirely of their own. The language they speak is the only African American creole created in the United States, a mash-up of English and African languages like Krio, Mende and Vai.
But as Goodwine settles beneath the shade of an oak tree, she recalls the scepticism the Gullah Geechee face. "We don't really know if they have a real culture," she remembers hearing. The misconceptions worry Goodwine. She fears her culture is in danger of being lost and forgotten, especially as black identity is reduced to what she calls a "monolith".
When African American studies first began, there was a prevailing assumption that slavery had destroyed any culture the slaves had brought from Africa. What could have possibly survived more than two centuries of brutality and oppression?
Some academics concluded that blacks in the US had no culture "independent of general American culture". That view was championed by Swedish Nobel laureate Karl Gunnar Myrdal in a searing study of the institutional barriers facing African Americans.
Myrdal's work was so powerful that it was cited in the decision to desegregate American schools – but his assertion that "American Negro culture" was merely a "distorted development, or an unhealthy condition, of American culture" continues to ignite debate. Was every speck of African culture lost in the trans-Atlantic slave trade? Is America's history of discrimination the single defining aspect of African American culture?
Goodwine bristles at the idea. After all, the Gullah Geechee Nation continues traditions born in Africa, long before white colonisers arrived.
Beloveds
I apologize that the blog format would not conform to my 5 efforts to
publish this article so that the paragraphs and ideas were correctly
displayed. Only wanting to present you with what you deserve ~ my Best
effort ~ pardon the need to click the link below to enjoy the
information about my own cultural heritage. Yep! Half of my heritage is pure Gullah from my father.Click here to access the article directly and enjoy the two 2 minute interviews that add deeper insight.
Love his sweet smile, laughter and humility.
