Tried With Fire

When I was growing up, I often heard the same questions from my classmates - Do you use chopsticks at home? Do you eat rice every day? Do your parents own a restaurant? Do you speak Chinese? (Answers: Rarely, usually, no, no.) I don't think these kids realized they were imposing a cultural stereotype on me. The stereotype may have been absorbed through ads like the  Calgon Chinese laundry commercial  and other inaccurate depictions of Chinese Americans. I don't know if they consciously knew they were being racist, but these biases have a way of infiltrating our minds. If we never stop to question them and learn otherwise, they remain firmly rooted, and out of the heart the mouth speaks. In You Are What You Love , James K.A. Smith uses stereotypes as an example of how we learn, not through conscious thought, but by habit. Stereotypes are just this sort of unconscious, habituated way of perceiving the world and acting accordingly. No one "signs up" to hold prejudi...

I started reading American Slavery, American Freedom by the late historian Edmund Morgan. This book was recommended in The Search for Christian America, so I checked it out of the library. I thought I was done with American history when I fulfilled my humanities requirements in undergrad, but I was wrong.  I'm not interested in history as a standalone subject. I read history because I want to understand what has led up to the present. We can vilify it, gaze at it through rose-colored glasses, but we can't escape it. How I see myself and where I find myself is a direct result of past events, and those events were not impartial nor kind to all people. We are reaping what was sowed whether we like it or not. But uncomfortable as it may be, the more accurately we understand our history can only help our understanding of one another. In a nutshell, I read history because only God has the right to think that He knows all there is to know about people and their experiences. ...

My pastor preached on Sunday from 1 Cor. 10 and the lessons in the passage for us today. The 2nd point in the sermon gave me a lot to ponder. Paul refers to Numbers 25, which tells of the Israelites' idolatry, God's righteous response, and Phinehas staying that judgment. While the exact nature of Phinehas' intervention would not translate to the present, Pastor Ryan remarked that his zeal for the Lord may not be that well-received today. Maybe he would have been told to back down, chill, and show a little grace. But this is a warning for us to not use the grace of God as a license to sin or an excuse to stop fighting sin .  We may not be tempted to worship Baal this week, but where is "grace" used to excuse sin today? As an excuse to: 1 - Disparage and mock people who disagree with us because we are obviously "right?" Thus our "rightness" takes precedence over loving our neighbor? Not only is pride at stake but the fear of los...

If you've watched  Hidden Figures,  it depicts a scene where Katherine Johnson (Goble at the time) comes into her new office and is handed a trashcan from a white engineer with the order to empty it the next time. The following excerpt from the book describes the incident very differently with much less drama than the big screen, but it gives insight into Katherine's character. The room hummed with pre-lunch activity as Katherine surveyed it for a place to wait for her new bosses. She made a beeline for an empty cube, siting down next to an engineer, resting her belongings on the desk and offering the man her winning smile. As she sat, and before she could issue a greeting in her gentle southern cadence, the man gave her a sideways glance, got up, and walked away. Katherine watched the engineer disappear. Had she broken some unspoken rule? Could her mere presence have driven him away? It was a private and unobtrusive moment, one that failed to dent the rhythm of the o...