Sublime

the everyday world in which he lived and worked: his formation in the segregated South of the 1930s, his early losses—his father’s death at an early age; a sojourn that exchanged an insular southern life for an urban northern one; the ceaseless search for a spiritual life that greatly expanded but was ultimately rooted in the southern black Christi

Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! If only we could find the Silence which

the hands of a man like Hitler, power is exploited and turned to ends which make for havoc and misery; but this should not cause us to ignore the basic soundness of the theory upon which he operated. A man’s conviction that he is God’s child automatically tends to shift the basis of his relationship with all his fellows. He recognizes at once that

It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness

it

St. Augustine (AD 354–430) in affirming every human being as a trinity of existence (being), intellect, and will.

Throughout black history Scripture was used for a definition of God and Jesus that was consistent with the black struggle for liberation.

alone is not enough, but without it, nothing else is of value. The first task is to get the self immunized against the most radical results of the threat of violence. When this is accomplished, relaxation takes the place of