Dear Westwood Family,
“Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. Take a look. It’s in a book. A Reading Rainbow.” Some, I hope most, of you are familiar with the PBS series Reading Rainbow. The show was hosted by LeVar Burton and ran for 26 years, during which it won more than 250 awards, including 26 Emmys and a Peabody Award. I loved this show, and even though an undiagnosed learning disability made reading more difficult for me, this show helped me fall in love with reading as a kid. I am delighted that the show is returning, and it will be hosted by library evangelist Mychal Threets, who became a social media star while working as a librarian.
I’m not sure if Reading Rainbow was one of the reasons I enjoyed reading the Bible as a kid, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m thankful to have grown up in a community that loved reading the Bible and saw it as a liberating text, rather than something used to oppress or harm people. After my sermon on Sunday titled “Just Because It’s In The Bible Doesn’t Make It Christian,” a member told me that I helped them see the Bible as a helpful tool for understanding how we practice Christianity, rather than the final authority on what’s Christian. They realized that the Bible is not just a book of judgment, but a series of unfolding stories about how God has been working to draw Creation toward Divine Love. I love the Bible, and reading it in community has transformed how I live, though I understand the many genres and complexities can feel overwhelming. If you’re interested in learning how to read and engage with the Bible, I’d love for you to join us for our study of the Hebrew Bible, which will begin in the first weeks of November.
Our book club is starting in the upcoming weeks, and we will be reading the book Indigo by Beverly Jenkins. So if you’d prefer to read something a little less complicated but still quite interesting, this book is for you! We will be joined by my friend Rev. Jeania Ree Moore, a PhD candidate at Yale whose dissertation examines Black women’s romance fiction. While romance fiction might seem like an unusual choice for a church book club, I assure you that this book is more than just a romance novel. As Rev. Moore argues in this essay, “Jenkins’s work is best understood not only by the category ‘Black romance’ for which she gained fame, but more specifically within the genre of chronicle…Throughout her oeuvre, Jenkins engages in what I refer to as Black chronicling, a form of Black historical writing that realizes the religious import, sacred place, and ethical function of Black history…As in the ancient world, chronicles in Black America function as counter-narratives to official historical accounts, creating communal histories that incorporate religious, racial, and political themes to locate audiences in “a linear narrative of descent” amid divine and destined movements in history. African American women authored distinctively gendered chronicles in which ‘women’s experiences [are] a crucial element of the plot.’ Chronicling new forms of history in “‘female’ literary genres,” these writers re-envisioned history itself and “implicitly challenged” the prevailing authors of Black collective identity, Black male clergy.
We are living in an era where we urgently need counter-histories and counter-narratives to reclaim our faith and identities, and to define them outside the influence of White Christian Nationalism. Both the Bible and the work of writers such as Jenkins are rich sources for us to discover new, liberating, and anti-oppressive ways to tell the story of who we are and who we want to become.
Love and Solidarity,
Rev. Dr. Carter
