Locs, Heels, and the Bible

Capitalism. The word alone denotes a hierarchical movement. Capitalism orients us to ask the wrong first question as it seeks to monetize a thing or thought before learning of its usefulness to preserving life. This is one of capitalism’s most dangerous spiritual achievements. It has organized an economy by catechizing people. It has shaped our desires, narrowed our moral imaginations, and convinced too many of us that the language of price is more reliable than the language of dignity. Health care, housing, and higher education should never have been caught up in the net of capitalist ideals. Never ever. Conversely, no one should have to prove profitability in order to receive medical care or have to be economically useful in order to have a safe place to sleep, or should have to mortgage decades of their future in order to learn, study, think, teach, imagine, and contribute to the world. These are not luxury items or elite indulgences. These are simply conditions for human flouri...

  Mayor Hudson, grace, and peace, I wish you a happy 2026. I am writing to you as a pastor and as a person charged with the care of human beings who live, work, worship, and raise children in this city. I am asking you to take clear, public action to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from operating in ways that harm our residents in Fort Pierce and to direct the Fort Pierce Police Department and all city agencies to end cooperation with ICE. I see this as being grounded in both moral responsibility and practical public safety. It is also grounded in my theological conviction that every person bears the image of God, and that a government’s legitimacy is measured in part by how it treats those who are most exposed to harm. The sacred text is consistent in its insistence that the stranger, the sojourner, and the immigrant are not marginal to the community’s obligations; but that they are central to them. From this vantage point, policies that make immigrants f...

I love Advent. It is not because I love waiting, because I don't. Advent is the season of waiting, great expectation, and preparing room for the One who comes wrapped up in human skin, bearing our humanity, and returning in final victory. I love Advent because it slows down the paceToo often though, our focus narrows to a manger and a mother, leaving the broader story of Jesus’ lineage behind a veil of silence. Yet the opening lines of the Gospel of Matthew resist that silence. In the genealogy of Jesus, there is an interruption of rhythm, a break in the usual pattern of “father of… father of…” Five women are named—five women whose presence in the text is not accidental but theological, not supplemental but central. In this sacred season, as we light candles and read prophecies, the Church must also remember the women whose lives, wombs, and choices shaped the bloodline of Christ. And we—especially those committed to the status and role of women—must not miss the invitation in the...

Each year, Christmas shows up wrapped up in tinsel and lots of sentiment, and for a brief moment the world pretends that it has learned how to love. We sing of peace while tiptoeing carefully around the bodies that peace is yet to hug. We speak of joy then we turn around and ration it. We light candles while entire neighborhoods live under the threat of structural darkness. Christmas tells the story of a child born into precarity, yet we have learned how to sentimentalize the manger and sanitize the risk involved. As much as we glide around the issue, the fact still remains that the Holy Family fled and hid to escape the structural darkness that never truly went away. So, Christmas, when told honestly, is about incarnation under pressure. God shows up where empire counts people as expendable and calls it order. God shows up without permission, paperwork, or without an invitation from power. That alone should trouble our carols. And then comes Boxing Day. Boxing Day is not as visible ...

It is no small thing to hold gratitude in a year like this, where everything feels stretched thin and the space between us and God feels so thick. I’ve heard fear humming at front doors, while anxiety makes the bed as if their names are on the  mortgage or the rental agreement. “Give thanks to the Lord, for God is good, and God’s steadfast love endures forever.” “How’s that working for you?” says the voice that will not let me go. I thought it was love that was supposed to hold on like that.  Instead, what stalks are policies that bruise communities, and the reports of people disappearing into systems that do not know their names. And yet, we are still here; breathing, choosing to gather, daring to hope in a time that punishes hope and continues to scope  out where a good dream is hiding that it might crush it. “Give thanks to the Lord, for God is good, and God’s steadfast love endures forever.” I insist, even as the sound of terror persists  and tries to snuff o...

Pastors are human beings and we gather stories the way chalices gather the fruit of the vine - in pours. The cup is beautiful, yes. However, it gets heavy. We do grieve more than we admit. We grieve the saints whose funerals we preside over. We grieve when members leave, sometimes with words that bruise, sometimes with silence that lingers. We grieve colleagues who retire, because their absence rearranges the hallways, the Zoom room, and the denominational map. We grieve the ministry plans that were not approved by the committee, the initiatives that ran out of volunteers, and we are not immune to the shifting ground. In addition, we carry our own private griefs.  Grief in ministry is part of the road. Scripture is honest about this. Israel sang laments in public. Jesus wept at a friend’s tomb and lamented over a city that would not listen. Jeremiah ’s tears watered the pages of prophecy. Paul writes of being “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing,” and the Psalms teach us to bring both...

Dear Arleigh,  Another year has come, and still my heart struggles to comprehend the weight of your absence. The world has the audacity and insensitivity to move on. The days fold into weeks, weeks fold into months, and here we are six flipping years later. My spirit carries the ache of you being gone every single day. Today especially, I feel the sharp edges of missing you, as though all that time has not dulled them at all. I still remember your laugh and how it could fill a room and light up every moment. I remember the way you looked at me when you were proud, or when you wanted to make sure that I saw you. I did, my child. I saw you then, and I still see you now. I see you in the small details of life and hear you in the peeling of the wind chime. I catch glimpses of you everywhere. There are days when I still want to call your name out loud, as if you will just walk through the door and answer me. Some nights I say prayers that you still know how much you are loved, and how m...

Right there in the ozarks of Arkansas, where the earth still holds the blood of lynched bodies and echoes of night riders, a new danger is taking root. Disguised as a quiet rural commune, a self-declared white nationalist town is being carved out with 160 acres of exclusion and hate. They call it “Return to the Land.” Return to the land my arse. Don’t let the pastoral branding fool you. It has nothing to do with community farming or sustainable living. This coded fortress is nothing more than a repackaged segregationist ideology with solar panels and Wi-Fi.   History as Rehearsal: This movement is not new either. It is the digital grandchild of the White Citizens’ Councils. The rhetoric has changed, but the goal has not. It is still remove, isolate, and dominate. The world has watched what happens when people build ethno-nationalist states. They don’t end in quiet. They end in genocide, apartheid, and collapsed democracies. (I say ‘collapsed democracies’ tongue in cheek). Als...

In Georgia this spring, Adriana Smith  30 years old and pregnant - was declared brain-dead. But for over four months, the state kept her body alive on machines to grow a fetus, without her family’s consent, without Adriana's voice, and without Adriana's dignity. Georgia's six-week abortion ban was cited as justification. And just like that, a dead woman’s body became a battleground in the war over fetal personhood. The legal machinery behind this tragedy  was meant to control life. And it did. This is what happens when law eclipses love, and when compassion is a casualty of political performance. The scaffolding that holds up such cruelty is older than this moment. It is rooted in power, patriarchy, and the insidious lie that some lives are disposable if others are deemed more "worthy." We’ve seen this before in the silencing of enslaved women, forced sterilizations, and in the criminalization of miscarriage.  I chair the Committee on the Status and Role of Women ...

I have something to say about the gall of Western media to still approach formerly colonized nations with the smugness of a master quizzing a servant. The now-viral interview with President Dr. Irfaan Ali of Guyana was definitely more than just a conversation about oil and development. It exposed the festering wound of neocolonial arrogance that still believes it has the right to interrogate the dignity and direction of sovereign nations while refusing to reckon with the centuries of theft, murder, and dehumanization that built its own empires. Yes, England, I am talking about you! Dr. Ali was understood the assignment to a spade a spade regardless to who is holding the hand. What we witnessed was the spirit of resistance cloaked in a presidential suit. With unflinching clarity and righteous indignation, he named the historical theft of resources, the violence of chattel slavery, the deceit of colonialism, and the continued exploitation masquerading as investment and partnership. And s...

They didn’t tell my people that they were free, right away. Even after the ink dried on the Emancipation Proclamation, they didn't tell them. Not even after the blood spilled and bodies piled in the name of a nation supposedly united under liberty and justice were they told. Instead, the power-brokers waited and held freedom hostage behind borders of greed, ego, and entitlement. And on June 19, 1865 - two and a half years later - when word finally reached the shores of Galveston, Texas, it wasn’t because the enslaved had been seen as human. It was because their labor was no longer useful, their bondage no longer profitable, and their bodies no longer essential to the overall goal. The story of Juneteenth is that of a freedom which was announced late, thus postponing justice, and forcing liberation to find its own breath after being suffocated for centuries. Here we are in 2025 watching an administration strip away aid to vulnerable nations, criminalize immigrants, roll back civil r...

I wrote "Tears at the Altar" because the silence was suffocating me, and my voice was missing from the conversations about grief.  There are certain stories that demand to be told. They are not satisfied with being whispered, scribbled into private journals, or diluted for someone else’s comfort. This book is one of those stories. It was born from a collision of love, loss, and lament in a sacred space that should have held me - and didn’t. Tears at the Altar is not just about my personal grief; it is a public reckoning. It’s a confrontation with how the church - our supposed refuge - often fails those who bleed in the pews and behind the pulpit. It explores how we, as communities of faith, avoid what is raw and messy, how we offer platitudes instead of presence, and how we bypass lament instead of allowing it to become part of our worship expression. Yes, I name names - grief, betrayal, silence, shame - and I hold them in the light of Scripture. From Job to Jesus, I make it ...

One day, the nation woke up to an ultimate heartbreak. After days of frantic searching, nine-year-old Chantel Crump was found lifeless in the bushes of Weatherills. Her abduction had mobilized the entire community, and her death shattered it. Chantel had simply been walking home from school when she accepted a ride from a woman. She trusted, as children should be able to, and for that, her life was stolen, along with a piece of Antigua's innocence. The island wept for Chantel and the others who have either disappeared without a trace, or found murdered and mutilated. You see, Antigua’s soil holds the tears of too many. Just months earlier, teenagers Yenifer Bridge and Achazia James were found murdered. Yenifer, a 16-year-old mother, disappeared one night and her toddler son was found wandering alone. Her body, later recovered, bore signs of brutal violence. Achazia, only 15, was found mutilated on a beach, the wounds so telling, they spoke of a wickedness the island still can...