Howard Thurman

Because what the world needs are people who have become fully alive.

And that's by Howard Thurman, who was actually Dr. King's teacher.

And it just went on from there.

And of course, there were challenges.

It was already 20 years old when I read it, but it was still like making waves there.

And then I think, you know, the other book that I actually write about in Backslide is Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman.

which is another book that changed, that one changed the way I thought about how you could think rigorously about a simple insight like the Golden Rule and think about its policy implications.

This one was a way of rethinking Jesus for me, right? Because it was about, and the Bible in some ways, Jesus, you know, is the person who's with those whose backs are against the wall.

That's the way Howard Thurman puts it in the book.

And tells a story about, you know, his grandmother who was enslaved, who loved the Bible, but would never let him read from Paul.

She couldn't read herself and she wanted him to read, but wanted to just read me what Jesus said.

Again, kids are drawn spontaneously to things that engage them, things that fulfill them, things they have a passion for.

There's a wonderful quote by Howard Thurman that goes like this.

Don't ask what the world needs.

Ask what makes you come alive and go and do that.

That's why I focused on that and the parallel between African American music.

It's fascinating the way that there's such a deep parallel between Black liberation theology, Latin American liberation theology, You know, in black liberation theology, people like James Cone and Roberts and, you know, Howard Thurman and so forth.

And then, of course, you got Gutierrez and Boff and a long list in Central and South America.

What you don't have is that long list in Ireland.

There's going to be something that works for you.

I love the famous quote from Howard Thurman who says, don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and do that because what the world needs are more people who have come alive.

So I think we all need to find our entry points to the work of healing, to the work of justice.

But I think the only invitation I would add to that is As we find the modalities of healing that work for you, whether that's therapy or group work or meditation or spiritual practice or whatever, to align that with movements for justice, To know that in an interdependent world, there is no such thing as individual healing.

That's, I guess, a question that has been with me the entire time that I've been working as, as you described, as a religious leader.

I think of the writing of Howard Thurman, who characterized Christianity as a religion for people whose backs were against the wall.

And he said that what he called the religion of Jesus, which is kind of my preferred term for the tradition, arises in the mind of Jesus as a system of techniques for overcoming and resisting oppression, which seems to be the context, both from, you know, all of the Exodus and exile writings and what we know about the Roman occupation of Judea in the first century and what would have been the world that he was speaking to and what God is revealing about who is savior of the world, right? And by what means is the world saved? So I feel like, you know, Thurman's voice in a more contemporary context is one that I came across through a curriculum the Episcopal Church produced to help people explore our own history of complicity in racist and white supremacist structures in our own country.

And when I undertook that curriculum with parishioners, that sentence, those two sentences that Thurman writes in his book, Jesus and the Disinherited, I found them foreign to my own experience of Christianity.

We take a breath, we contemplate them, we feel them, we journal about them, we think about them, we reflect on them, we talk about them with the people that we love and we share together and we find openings begin to happen.

And I'd like to close with a beautiful quote from Howard Thurman, one of my favorites that we say around here a lot because it's just so good.

Don't ask what the world needs.

Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.

yeah.

A lot of theologians, I remember Howard Thurman, who's a theological father for me.

He was a mentor to Dr.

King.