Crossroads

Last spring when the board of the Association for Death Education & Counseling met just before our annual conference in Atlanta, my friend and colleague Louis Gamino, ADEC president last year had arranged for our board to visit the King Center . It was a moving, poignant afternoon. Having grown up in the deeply divided and segregated south of the 1960s, the visit to the King Center rekindled some emotions long buried. Some of us stood in the rain in front of Dr. & Mrs. King's tomb. One stirring moment for many of us came as we sat together in the old Ebenezer Baptist Church where over the PA system, docents regularly replay the audiotape of the last sermon Martin Luther King preached in that church just weeks before his death. It was the same sermon--one in which he retold how he hoped he would be remembered, almost as if foretelling his death just weeks away--that Mrs. King had replayed at his Palm Sunday with friends funeral. The following Sunday morning, a few of us fro...

William G. Hoy Baylor University While we are reading a lot about the illness- and death-toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic upheaval of securities markets, we are seeing comparatively little about the real impact on the poor, and the new poor of this experience. In my personal devotional time this week, I looked again at Psalm 112 --a text shared by Jews and Christians but whose principles are timeless and trans-religious. Among other things, this author writes of the person who "respects the Lord" and seeks to live a life of righteousness and justice. But, it is verse 9 that speaks volumes to me: " They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor, their righteousness endures forever; their horn will be lifted high in honor " (New International Version). There is no promise of "give and get" here that is so often predicted by the so-called prosperity gospel. Instead, the words are a simple declaration of fact: when we give generously, lit...