Uncommon Faithfulness Quotes

“Mary's song, like other songs by women in sacred scripture, is not a song of pious submission but one of righteous judgment and vindication for all who, like Mary and her son, are born poor and oppressed and unjustly victimized. She is prophesying the coming kin-dom of God, a time and place where those who are poor will receive God's bounty and those who are hungry will be fed while the rich and arrogant, those who are unjust, will be cast away.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“Theology must learn to see in the dark. Theology emerges from God's gracious act of mercy at our wrestling for meaning in our human condition.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“The blues demand of theology a prophetic criticism that contests all arbitrary uses of power or coercion, that challenges individual acquisitive materialism, that repudiates any and every attempt to undermine humanity's very humanness, and that cherishes the lives of ordinary everyday children and women and men of all cultures and races.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“Stories abound of Waters confirming black and white children together in the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Raleigh, of his insisting on having white and black acolytes at masses at which he presided, and of his requiring the diocesan newspaper to cover the activities of black Catholics and their parishes with as much interest as they covered those of white Catholics in the diocese.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“The priests who attended this secret meeting did so in the tradition of their enslaved black ancestors who often stole off in secrecy to learn to read and write. Like their ancestors, they were “stealing a meeting.” The meeting lasted well into the night.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“Miscegenation was still a big fear. And often competing schools would cancel sporting matches with Cathedral Latin because they did not want their students playing black students.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“Each conference speaker pointed out the horrors inflicted upon people of African descent in various Latin societies and their projections of black people as subhuman.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“These incidents might seem trivial, but they are not. Actions speak louder than words.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“To many political planners and policy-makers in the Western world, Africa remains an irritating appendage to the human community.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“Grounded in the neo-platonic dualistic separation of the sacred and secular worlds, such an understanding has enabled the spread of a race-based hierarchical/patriarchal system that supported the enslavement not just of other human beings but of other Christians, the dehumanization of women and persons of color,”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“the Catholic Church was an egalitarian organization based on the equality of all God's children.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“the darkness of God, the theologian accepts the gift of vocation—to bear the mythos, desires, sorrows, struggle, and hope of God's black peoples. Yet black Catholic theology, like the blues, is problematical, fluid, inventive, and the darkness illuminates new intersections, new switches, new tracks.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“black Catholic theology must be at once critically political and deeply mystical.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“By engaging in dialectical conversation with this music, theology places black vernacular culture at the heart of its mediation of the Christian message.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“the medieval practice of proclaiming saints through the acclamation of the people.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“St. Martin Luther King, Jr.” This sparked a conflict with Cardinal John Cody, cardinal archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“Before the council closed in 1965, it issued sixteen documents—constitutions, declarations, and decrees—that made many widespread decisions about the life of the church. In an interview Reverend Theodore K. Parker observed that although Vatican II did not specifically tell Catholics to go out and participate in the civil rights movement, those who were inclined to do so might have taken inspiration from Gaudium et spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“For Waters, faith expressed as love was the only answer.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“Communist, an enemy of southern culture, and a traitor of white Christianity.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“He went on to state that racial supremacy “is heresy and should be condemned.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience

“Waters said, “Meeting a preserving Negro did for me what logic could not do.” It was the first time Waters looked at his culture critically and light of the gospel. He observed: “I am a Southerner. I have been prejudiced. I had to get rid of my prejudice to get to be a little more Catholic.”
― M. Shawn Copeland, Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience