"Exploring American thought, democracy, culture, religion, Haiti, and the Black Atlantic to better understand the past and future of the Americas and the world–toward human flourishing."
I want to be remembered as a man of God whose life was deeply rooted in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Through faith, I sought to inspire hope, empower others, and guide people with wisdom, knowledge, humility, and love.
I want to be remembered as a devoted husband who cherished his wife, and as a loving father who faithfully guided his children to become people of integrity, wisdom, and compassion, as well as national and global citizens who contribute meaningfully to society and whose lives are marked by kindness, hospitality, justice, and a genuine concern for others.
I want to be remembered as a scholar who believed that knowledge exists to serve humanity, empower individuals, transform their living conditions; a teacher who inspired generations of students to become better human beings; a public intellectual who spoke truth with courage and grace; and a servant-leader who devoted his life to the flourishing of Haiti, the poor, the homeless, immigrants, refugees, and vulnerable youth through education, mentoring, servant-leadership, and resources.
I want to be remembered as a builder of people and institutions, and as a person who invested in lives, created opportunities where none existed, and founded organizations that continued to transform communities long after I was gone. I hope that my books, my teaching, my mentorship, and my service will bear lasting fruit for generations to come.
Above all, I want my life to testify that faith in Jesus Christ, lived out through love, justice, compassion, and faithful service, has the power to transform individuals, families, communities, and nations. If those who knew me remember that I loved God wholeheartedly, loved my family sacrificially, and dedicated my life to serving others with humility and hope, then I will have lived a life of enduring purpose towards human flourishing and the common good.
In 1938 at the Evian Conference, 32 countries refused to help Jewish refugees. Only one small Black Republic said YES. From 1937 to 1940, Haiti issued passports and visas to save hundreds of Jewish families from the Holocaust. While America, Britain and others closed their doors, Haiti opened hers. This is the forgotten history of Haiti and the Jewish people – a story of RESPECT, LOVE & UNITY. 🇭🇹❤️🇮🇱
Sources: US Holocaust Museum, Haiti Jewish Refugee archives/Patrick Bellegarde-Smith
Follow up post about the history of Jews 🇮🇱 in Haiti 🇭🇹
Here’s my recommended text about the history of Jews in Haiti:
“Histoire juive d’Haïti” by Joseph Bernard Jr
Description “Chassés d’Espagne en 1492 par le Décret d’Alhambra, la nation juive dut se trouver de nouvelles terres d’accueil. La découverte du Nouveau monde lui offrit cette opportunité, et certaines familles sépharades choisirent de s’installer à Hispaniola. Bien que contribuant à la prospérité de la Perle des Antilles, les Juifs de Saint-Domingue furentl’objet de lois discriminatoires édictées par la monarchie française. La Révolution française de 1789 allait apporter un vent nouveau pour la nation juive, mais la révolte des esclaves de 1791 la contraignit à nouveau de s’envoler pour d’autres horizons afin d’avoir la vie sauve. Après 1804, d’autres familles juives s’installèrent dans la nouvelle Républiqued’Haïti, à la faveur de ce grand réseau commercial de la nation juive en Amérique. La migration levantine de la fin du XIXème siècle allait faire revivre la population juive d’Haïti, menacée d’extinction par la déculturation. Et durant la Shoah, le gouvernement haïtien sauva la vie de centaines de Juifs d’Europe en leur octroyant la nationalité haïtienne. Autant de liens historiques qui unissent le peuple juif à Haïti, pays sans synagogue ni quartier juif.”
[Expelled from Spain in 1492 by the Alhambra Decree, the Jewish people were forced to seek new lands of refuge. The discovery of the New World offered such an opportunity, and some Sephardic families chose to settle on the island of Hispaniola.
Although they contributed to the prosperity of Saint-Domingue, known as the “Pearl of the Antilles,” the Jews of Saint-Domingue were subjected to discriminatory laws enacted by the French monarchy. The French Revolution of 1789 brought new hope for the Jewish people, but the slave uprising of 1791 once again forced them to flee to other lands in order to save their lives.
After 1804, following Haiti’s independence, other Jewish families settled in the new Republic of Haiti, benefiting from the extensive commercial network of Jewish communities throughout the Americas. The Levantine migration of the late nineteenth century revived Haiti’s Jewish population, which had been threatened with extinction through cultural assimilation.
During the Holocaust (Shoah), the Haitian government helped save the lives of hundreds of European Jews by granting them Haitian nationality.]
Table of contents of Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan (HarperCollins,1998).
1. The Epic of Gilgamesh 2. Homer, The Iliad 3. Homer, The Odyssey 4. Confucius, The Analects 5. Aeschylus, The Oresteia 6. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone 7. Euripides, Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Electra, The Bacchae 8. Herodotus, The Histories 9. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War 10. Sun-tzu, The Art of War 11. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, The Clouds, The Birds 12. Plato, Selected Works13. Aristotle, Ethics, Politics, Poetics 14. Mencius, The Book of Mencius 15. The Ramayana 16. The Mahabharata 17. The Bhagavad Gita 18. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Grand Historian 19. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 20. Virgil, The Aeneid 21. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 22. Saint Augustine, The Confessions 23. Kalidasa, The Cloud Messenger, Sakuntala 24. The Koran 25. Hui-neng, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch 26. Firdausi, Shah Nameh 27. Sei Shônagon, The Pillow Book 28. Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji 29. Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat 30. Dante, The Divine Comedy 31. Luo Kuan-chung, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms 32. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales 33. The Thousand and One Nights 34. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince 35. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel 36. Wu Ch’eng-en, Journey to the West 37. Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays38. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote 39. William Shakespeare, Complete Works40. John Donne, Selected Works41. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P’ing Mei) 42. Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems 43. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 44. René Descartes, Discourse on Method 45. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica 46. Molière, Selected Plays47. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (Pensées) 48. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress 49. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government 50. Matsuo Bashô, The Narrow Road to the Deep North 51. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 52. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels 53. Voltaire, Candide and other works 54. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 55. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones 56. Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, The Dream of the Red Chamber (a.k.a. The Story of the Stone) 57. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions 58. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy 59. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson 60. Thomas Jefferson and others, Basic Documents in American History (ed. Richard B. Morris) 61. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers (ed. Clinton Rossiter)62. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust 63. William Blake, Selected Works64. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 65. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare 66. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Emma 67. Stendhal, The Red and the Black 68. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Cousin Bette 69. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Works70. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales71. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 72. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women 73. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species 74. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls 75. Edgar Allan Poe, Short Stories and Other Works76. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair 77. Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit 78. Anthony Trollope, The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now, Autobiography 79. The Brontë Sisters: 79A. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 79B. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 80. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience 81. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons 82. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto 83. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener 84. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch 85. Walt Whitman, Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass, A Backward Glance O’er Travelled Roads 86. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary 87.Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov 88. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace 89. Henrick Ibsen, Selected Plays90. Emily Dickenson, Collected Poems91. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass 92. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn 93. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams 94. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Castorbridge 95. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism, Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience 96. Henry James, The Ambassadors 97. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and other works98. Sigmund Freud, Selected Works, including The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Civilization and Its Discontents 99. George Bernard Shaw, Selected Plays and Prefaces100. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo 101. Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Selected Short Stories102. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth 103. William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiography 104. Natsume Sôseki, Kokoro 105. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past 106. Robert Frost, Collected Poems107. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain 108. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India 109. Lu Hsün, Collected Short Stories110. James Joyce, Ulysses 111. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves 112. Franz Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories113. D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love 114. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters 115. Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night 116. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, Collected Plays117. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 118. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying 119. Ernest Hemingway, Short Stories120. Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness 121. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Dreamtigers 122. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory 123. George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984, Burmese Days 124. R.K. Narayan, The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets 125. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape 126. W.H. Auden, Collected Poems127. Albert Camus, The Plague, The Stranger 128. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift 129. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, Cancer Ward 130. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 131. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion 132. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude 133. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
I recently heard a reformed Black theologian argue that American evangelicalism lacks a coherent doctrine of social ethics. According to his critique, evangelicals often insist, “Just teach the Bible, and God will do the rest,” yet they provide little theological framework for engaging the social, cultural, political, and economic realities that shape human life. As a result, the tradition has often struggled to articulate how Christian faith should address systemic injustice, racial inequality, economic disparities, and the responsibilities of believers in the public square. His argument was not that Scripture is inadequate or irrelevant to these matters, but that many evangelical communities have failed to develop a robust social ethic that connects biblical theology to the complex moral challenges of contemporary society.
“Grateful Farewell to San Jacinto College: Reflections on Four Years of Leadership and Service”
Today, Friday, July 17, 2026, marks my final day at San Jacinto College, where I have had the privilege of serving as Chair of the English Department for the past four years. It has been both an honor and a joy to lead an exceptional team of 37 talented, student-centered faculty members and staff. Together, our full-time and part-time faculty have remained deeply committed to student success, the English department, and to advancing the mission of San Jacinto College.
These four years have been among the most meaningful of my professional life. I have built lasting friendships and created memories that I will always cherish. Among the greatest joys of my role was taking the time to connect with faculty members, checking in to see how they were doing, supporting their professional growth, and celebrating their accomplishments. I also treasured the opportunity to continue teaching students and witnessing their intellectual, personal, and professional development.
I am especially grateful to Dean DeRhonda McWaine, who has been one of the finest supervisors and leaders with whom I have had the privilege to work. Her mentorship, unwavering support, thoughtful guidance, and wise counsel have shaped me into a better leader, educator, and person. I will always be thankful for her confidence in me and the opportunities she provided throughout my tenure.
As I close this chapter, I will deeply miss the English Department, my colleagues, friends, and, above all, the students who have made my experience at San Jacinto College so rewarding.
I leave San Jacinto College with a heart full of gratitude as I embark on a new chapter of my academic career. Beginning this fall semester, I am honored to begin serving as Professor of English and Endowed Chair in American Studies at Louisiana State University Shreveport (LSUS). I look forward to embracing new opportunities for teaching, scholarship, leadership, and service, while building meaningful relationships with new colleagues and students at LSUS. I am excited to invest in their success, contribute to the university’s mission, and continue growing as a scholar, educator, and leader.
To everyone at San Jacinto College, thank you for your friendship, trust, support, and partnership over these past four years. San Jac will always hold a special place in my heart.
The trombone was silent. Sheet music lay scattered across the room of your heart. Its trembling beat outpaced the rhythm of the night. Your voice searched the silence, while your soul rested in love’s darkest corner.
Every silence now feels too loud. The ghosts of tomorrow have become your only comfort. Your voice still echoes through the empty room. Even when the night is through, I still hear the sound of you. Every cry, every tear, becomes another memory of a love slowly fading.
Let us dance to heal together, to forget the wounds of love, the loneliness of faded passion, to forge a new union that embraces both our pain and our joy.
Let us walk into the dancehall tonight. Your fingers run through my hair. I’ll play your favorite song. Every beat becomes a new vow. Every touch against your skin sings the love we cannot hide. Every line, every word, every chord celebrates the miracle of us. The saxophone sees you and plays your favorite rhythm. May this dance fill our hearts tonight.
Our shadows shall pass. Every tender touch binds our lips as one. Let the music move through our bodies, let the song set us free, the rhythm of a single heartbeat may knit two souls into one.
She lives a life of withered passion, a love that slowly fades. “Just a simple text,” she whispers, “to remind me that you still care, that you haven’t changed, that I still have a place in your heart.”
She yearns for reconnection, for the closeness they once shared. He watches her from afar, realizing his heart has learned to survive without her. Not because he does not care, but because caring has taken another form.
Both go their separate ways, surrendering the future they once imagined. Dreams deferred. Promises undone. A love that proved temporary.
She left the love she once shared with him to memory’s keeping. The silence he carried away became the language of her grief. It echoed through the chambers of her soul. It grew louder than every word they had spoken. A love buried beneath the sand. A lament without an ending. Even sunlight could not awaken his smile.
Everywhere her feet touch, she remembers the scent of his body. For one last time, she gazes upon his soft and gentle face in a photograph they once took together.
Upon the beach sand, she draws the outline of his smile, so she can see him once again. She sheds a tear, one that becomes a moment of heartache, pain, sadness, memory blues.
She cries for his return, for the pain is too much to bear. She searches for him in all the hard places, for her soul is colored by lament.
Without hope, without a guide, her search lingers… endures… unfinished.
Celucien L. Joseph, PhD, Professor of English | Endowed Chair in American Studies | Author | Public Intellectual 