We will compare and contrast Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Funeral Oration of Pericles, and Winston Churchill’s speech honoring those pilots who saved democracy after the Battle of Britain. […]
To a Stoic Philosopher, the question of Theodicy, or why God permits bad things to happen to good people, why God permits suffering, is simply absurd. The fact is, we do suffer, we will face injustices, we will suffer illnesses and death, and the rain falls on both the good man and the bad man. God will not shield us from suffering and injustice, but God will provide us with the strength to endure the challenges of this life. […]
Frederick Douglass remembers, “In the South I was a slave, thought of and spoken of as property,” as chattel, like talking livestock. “In the Northern states, a fugitive slave was hunted like a felon, to be hurled into the terrible jaws of slavery, doomed by an inveterate prejudice against color,” “shut out from cabins on steamboats, refused admission to respectable hotels, caricatured, scorned, scoffed, mocked and maltreated by anyone with a white skin.” […]
Homer’s Odyssey depict the deep Greek past where might makes right, where brave soldiers fight for justice, where grievances and murders are settled by blood feuds. As Greek emerged from its Dark Ages in the seventh century, the Greeks in Athens sought to establish a more systematic system of justice with laws governing the state. Draco was appointed by the ruling aristocracy to be a lawmaker to codify new laws to replace justice by feuds, now the Senate of the Areopagus would hear cases of homicide. […]
Both concerned parents and activists who have no children have been flooding school board meetings across the country yelling and threatening each other over critical race theory and whether we should be teaching our children American History starting with our Founding Fathers and the American Revolution when we won our liberty from the British in 1776, or should we teach our children that our country was originally built on the unpaid labor and bones of slaves since the first was shipped over in 1619 with the first colonists? What role did slavery play in the founding of our nation, and when did slavery end? Finally, when discussing what books should be included in young students’ lessons, one book has stirred considerable controversy, Beloved, by Tomi Morrison. […]
Many white protestors at School Board meetings have only a vague notion of what Critical Race Theory means, other than somehow it is a communist plot by blacks, or that it intends to make white children feel guilty about themselves or their country, in essence they want teachers to teach their white children some variation of the Lost Cause myth, that the Civil War was not caused by slavery, that the Civil War was fought for states’ rights, and that the North should not have invaded the South by arms. […]
These quick book reviews include links to our YouTube videos and blogs on Civil Rights and American History topics, plus related topics. […]
Although the Bible does not specifically condemn slavery, the Bible does encourage us to treat all of our fellow men with dignity and respect, whether they are slave or free. In succeeding centuries, several early Church Fathers either condemned the institution of slavery or tried to weaken its grasp. […]
Day after day Father Tolton was seen coming in or out of the shacks, the rat-infested hovels and tenement houses. He listened compassionately to complaints of unemployment, desertion, injustice, depravity. Father Tolton knew how to bring hope and comfort to the sick and dying; he knew how to mitigate human suffering and sorrow because eh himself had experienced the lash of the slave driver as well as the lash of the white man’s tongue. […]
Frederick Douglas was born a slave in Maryland in the late 1820’s, he can only guess how old he is, like most slaves he did not know when he was born. He escaped slavery on his second attempt to run away to the Northern states, and not only did he teach himself how to read, he became a spell-binding orator and abolitionist, agitating for the end of slavery, and becoming a best-selling author, publishing three autobiographies, other books and a newspaper. Some bigots claimed it was impossible for an ex-slave to be able to write that well, though they could not argue that it was not him making his speeches. […]
Copyright 2017
