I just found out yesterday that my new book, “Revolutionary Change and Democratic Religion: Christianity, Vodou, and Securalism” (2020) was selected (among the top finalists)
to receive the “Livre d’utilité politique” of the 2020 Edition PoliticoTech Awards.”
I have a new article published in “Black Theology: An International Journal”
“The Meaning of James H. Cone and the Significance of Black Theology: Some Reflections on His Legacy”
Celucien L. Joseph
Pages: 112-143
Published online: 22 Jun 2020
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14769948.2020.1785662
What is Biblical Christianity?
Biblical Christianity is a lifestyle. Christianity is how you treat people with love, compassion, care, understanding, and empathy. Christianity is the Jesus’ way to be in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. It is also to hate all falsehood, human oppression and exploitation, and all forms of injustice that dehumanize people and reduce them to non-beings. Being a Christian means more than reciting a prayer to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. It is how you respond to and treat people who are different from you, even those who reject your Jesus, your Christianity, and your God. Christianity is more than words or head knowledge.
It is forgiveness.
It is repentance.
It t is action.
It is reconciliation.
It is peace.
It is unity.
It is hope.
It is love.
Christianity is love for people because God is love and God loves all people.
“What if God were one of us?”
God does not care if you’re a Republican or Democrat just like he does not care if you’re Black, Asian, Brown, White, Hispanic, or Native American. This statement does not say however God is non-political and color-blind. Also, this assertion does not say that God does not care about political actions and public policies and how they make impact a nation and affect its citizens, such as the poor and the economically-disadvantahed population in society. God is a political Sovereign and acts politically every day. God’s politics is a mighty force for the promotion of justice and equity, human freedom and agency, harmony and balance, and mutual reciprocity and interdependence in society and in among individuals.
All rulers in the world make political choices. God is a ruler in the world. Therefore, God makes political choices. Yet God’s political interventions are not separared from his theological ideas and activism. The political is theological in the same way the theological is embedded in the political. Divine actions in human societies engage both the sphere of politics and the realm of theology. In other words, all God’s actions in the world are politico-theological.
Second, God is very conscious about the ethnic and racial diversity of his creation because he (God) created all people in his image. When people of various ethnic and racial groups fail to live in harmony and unity with one another, they lessen the image of God in themselves and diminish the glory of God which they bear in their humanity and essential nature. The belittling of God’s image in individuals may include ethical interventions and judicial forces that are unjust, inequitable, and anti-human flourishing.
Correspondingly, political actions that marginalize individuals and families and public policies that do not improve their living conditions do not affirm a positive anthropology associating with the divine stamp on people.
It is the image of God in individuals that makes the life of a particular racial and ethnic group meaningful in this world. It is also the designation and identiy of individuals as bearers of the divine imprint that makes life in this world worth living and sacred. The sacredness and dignity of an ethnic group or race is vital simply because of the intimate rapport with the divine validation of all lives. In the same line of thought, the image of God in the poor and oppressed man, the image of God in the single mother and the rape victim, and the image of God in the undocumented immigrant and refugee makes their individual and collective lives and experience the target of human attention and compassion, care and empathy, and humanization and valorization.
“Why I’m Politically and Morally Bias in the Presidential Election”
Arguably, I am politically bias and incorrect when it comes to voting in the presidential election in America. I must admit that my allegiance is not single or one. I’m politically and morally bias for five main reasons:
Happy Saturday and enjoy the weekend, friends!
I will be speaking at noon on this topic: “Vodou and Christianity: A Necessary Dialogue in the Twenty-First Century”
vous êtes invité à un webinaire Zoom.
Quand : 21 août 2020 03:00 PM Paris
Sujet : DU CONFINEMENT AU DECONFINEMENT DE LA THEOLOGIE HAITIENNE
Veuillez cliquer sur le lien ci-dessous afin de rejoindre le webinaire :
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84461193920
Ou touchez l’écran une fois sur votre iPhone :
États-Unis d’Amérique: +16699006833,,84461193920# or +19294362866,,84461193920#
“Index to (Re-)reading Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: A 30-day Meditation”
I created an index for the 30 days of our (re-)reading of Saint Augustine’s Confessions and meditating upon his life, and his ideas and understandings of God. At the link, you will have access to the individual title and theme associating with each reading and reflection for all the past 30 days. Beginning in September, we will read again (for me it is a rereading; perhaps, for some of you, it will be a new reading. I will post a daily reflection or meditation on this text) through Saint Augustine’s masterpiece, The City of God. I hope you have enjoyed the spiritual and intellectual journey through The Confessions.
Day 1: Nothing in God Dies!
Day 2: God, the Most Beautiful One and the Most Present One
Day 3: You Made us for Thyself: We Rest in Thee
Day 4: God, the Infinite Life and the Infinite Being, is One and the Same!
Day 5: Honoring and Glorifying God through Reading and Writing, and Thinking and Scholarship
Day 6: Human Beings Cannot Hide Away from God, the Most Glorious One
Day 7: The Holy Scriptures are Better than the Prose of Cicero!
Day 8: God, the Immutable One, is the Life of souls, and the Life of lives
Day 9: Man’s Mind is Not Supreme!
Day 10: God, the Everlasting Good, and our True Strength
Day 11: In Quest for a Clearer Vision of You and and the Truth
Day 12: The Joy from Faith and Shallow Happiness
Day 13: No one is Better than God, the Incorruptible One
Day 14: Christ, the Perfect Man, and the Wisdom of God
Day 15: His Conversion
Day 16: Writing about God as Vocation
Day 17: In praise of the godly Mother
Day 18: On Jesus Christ as the Immortal and Eternal Word and Truth of God
Day 19: What was God doing before he made the heavens and the earth?
Day 20: God and Time, and the Natural World
Day 21: The Past and the Future Do Not Exist!
Day 22: God, the Most Majestic and the Most Beautiful One!
Day 23: Toward the Quest for True Happiness and Joy, and Truth
Day 24: The God Who Makes both Men and Women Feel Special!
Day 25: The Literary and Analogical Trinity of God
Day 26: The God who Commands: He is the Common Good of all
Day 27: Creation and the Creator
Day 28: God and the Power of Human Memory
Day 29: Representational Hermeneutics: The Spiritual Truths Revealed in the Created Order
Day 30: God, Grant us Rest and Peace!
Index to Rereading Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: A 30-day Meditation!
Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 30 (God, Grant us Rest and Peace!)
In the past 30 days (our initial rereading began in July), we have been rereading and meditating upon Confessions (ca.397- ca. 401) by Aurelius Augustinus (ca.354- ca. 430), which he wrote in Latin. Many thinkers and scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, have argued that Confessions is the most important intellectual work and spiritual autobiography ever written in Christian history and Western history of literature. Technically, Confessions is the most important work in African Christianity and African literary and intellectual production, as its author was not Western, but African, and was born in Africa, not in Europe. Augustine was born in the small town of Tagaste, Numidia (Libya in Northern Africa) in 354 to a mixed racial family and grew up in an ethnically diverse environment; his African Christian mother Monica was of the Berber background (She is the most important human character in Augustine’s autobiography); his father Patricius (Patrick) was one of the representatives of Roman authority in the African town of Tagaste. He attended went school in Madaura and later in Carthage.
Augustine served as an instructor of rhetoric at Carthage (ca. 376-83), Rome, (383-4), and then at Milan (384-6). He was an excellent theologian, and a brilliant prolific writer in the footsteps of his African theological predecessors (“Church fathers”) Tertullian and Athanasius. He attended school in Madaura and later in Carthage. In 391, he was ordained as a priest and presided as Bishop of Hippo and over the African provinces there. Augustine was the greatest (African) Christian theologian in the history of Christianity.
Among his most influential works include the City of God (De civitate Dei) (412-426), Against the Skeptics (Contra Academicos (387), On the Immortality of the Soul (De immortalitate anima (387), On Free Will (De libero arbitrio) (388), On True Religion (De vera religione), On Christian Discipline (De disciplina Christiana) (398), Confessions (Confessiones) (397-401), On Baptism (400), On Nature and Grace (De natura et gratia), On The Trinity (De Trinatate) (415-420), The Predestination of the Saints (428), The Gift of Perseverance (429). Following Tertullian’s theological logic on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, Augustine brings greater clarity, with theological force and intellectual brilliance, to expound on the nature of the divine life and the interconnecting actions and interdependent movements of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
In his masterpiece, The City of God, Augustine articulates cogently a theological and philosophical vision of human history–one that puts God at the center of human history; thus, global history is theocentric for Augustine–God’s eschatological plan for human destiny, and the rapport between God and his creation. He explained the fall of the Roman Empire as the result of the overwhelmingly polytheistic culture and moral bankruptcy, and the refusal of the Romans to worship and give honor to the true and eternal God. Augustine believed that the fall of the Roman Empire was part of the divine providence and God’s plan of human history. In other words, God had acted negatively toward the Empire because of its moral and theological shortcomings, as well as the problems of balancing justice and equality between the citizens. Overall, for Saint Augustine, Rome fell because of a tremendous politico-theological failure. Augustine’s philosophy of history has had a significant impact on medieval European historians, writers, and philosophers, especially in the way they perceived and articulated the place of Europe in global history: both on the sacred and secular level. As a work of intellectual and philosophical history, in The City of God, Augustine articulates a unified understating of global history that would shape European medieval history and define the West’s sense of itself in the economy and providence of God.
It is from this perspective, I am pleased to share with you the final meditation on the Confessions; the words that I reproduce in the paragraphs below are Augustine’s final words or prayer, which he wrote on the last page of his spiritual autobiography.
Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 30 (God, Grant us Rest and Peace!)
“O Lord God grant us peace, for all that we have is your gift. Grant us the peace of repose, the peace of the Sabbath, the peace which has no evening. For this worldly order in all its beauty will pass away. All these things that are very good will come to an end when the limit of their existence is reached. They have been allotted their morning and their evening.
But the seventh day is without evening and the sun shall not set upon it, for you have sanctified it and willed that it shall last forever. Although your eternal repose was unbroken by the fact of creation, nevertheless, after all your works were done and you had seen that they were very good, you rested on the seventh day. And in your Book we read this as a presage that when our work in this life is done, we too shall rest in you in the Sabbath of eternal life, though our works are very good only because you have given us the grace to perform them.
In that eternal Sabbath you will rest in us, just as now you work in us. The rest that we shall enjoy will be yours, just as the work that we now do is your work done through us. But you, O Lord, are eternally at work and eternally at rest. It is not in time that you see or in time that you move or in time that you rest: yet you make what we see in time; you make time itself and the repose which comes when time ceases.
We see the things which you have made, because they exist. But they only exist because you see them. Outside ourselves we see that they exist, and in our inner selves we see that they are good. But when you saw that it was right that they should be made, in the same act you saw them made.
It was only after a lapse of time that we were impelled to do good, that is, after our hearts had received the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Before then our impulse was to do wrong, because we had deserted you. But you, who are the one God, the good God, have never ceased to do good. By the gift of your grace some of the works that we do are good, but they are not everlasting. After them we hope that we shall find rest, when you admit us to the great holiness of your presence. But you are Goodness itself and need no good besides yourself. You are for ever at rest, because you are your own repose.
What man can teach another to understand this truth? What angel can teach it to an angel? What angel can teach it to a man? We must ask it of you, seek it in you; we must knock at your door. Only then shall we receive what we ask and find what we seek; only then will the door be opened to us.”
Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 29 (Representational Hermeneutics: The Spiritual Truths Revealed in the Created Order)
“I have also considered what spiritual truths you intended to be expressed by the order in which the world was created and the order in which the creation is described. I have seen that while each single one of your works is good, collectively they are very good, and that heaven and earth, which represent the Head and the body of the Church, were predestined in your Word, that is, in your only begotten Son, before all time began, when there was no morning and no evening.
But then you began to enact in time all that you had predestined in eternity, for it was your purpose to reveal what had been hidden and to introduce order where disorder reigned. For we were overwhelmed by our sins; we had fallen away from you into the depths of darkness, and your good Spirit was moving over us, ready to bring help when the time was due. You made just men of sinners and set them apart from the wicked; you established the authority of your Book between those above, who would be obedient to you, and those beneath, who would be made subject to them; and you gathered all the faithless together into one body, so that the earnest devotion of the faithful might be clearly seen and they might bear you fruit in works of mercy, by distributing their worldly wealth to the poor in order to acquire heavenly riches for themselves. Next you set special light to burn the firmament. These were your saints, who are possessed of the word that gives life. In them these shines the sublimed authority that is conferred upon them by their spiritual gifts.
After this, from corporeal matter, you produced sacraments, miracles that men could see, and voices to carry your message according to the firmament of your Book. These were meant for the initiation of unbelievers and also for the blessing of the faithful. Next you formed the living soul of the faithful, the soul that lives because it has learnt to control its passions by unremitting continence. Then you took man’s mind, which is subject to none but you and needs to imitate no human authority and renewed it in your own image and likeness. You made rational action subject to the rule of the intellect, as woman is subject to man, and since your ministers are needed for the perfection of the faithful in this life, you willed that the faithful, by providing them with what they need for temporary use, should good works that would bear fruit in the future life.
All these works of yours we see. We see that together they are very good, because it is you who see them in us and it was you who gave us the Spirit by which we see them and love you in them.”
Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 28 (God and the Power of Human Memory)
“When I am told that it is possible to ask three kinds of question—whether a thing is, what it is, and of what sort it is—I retain images of the sounds of which these words are composed. I know that the sounds have passed through the air and now are no more. But the facts which they represent have not reached me through any of my bodily senses. I could not see them at all except in my mind, and it is not their images that I store in my memory but the facts themselves. But they must themselves tell me, if they can, by what means they entered my mind. For I can run through all the organs of sense, which are the body’s gateways to the mind, but I cannot find any by which these facts could have tended. My eyes tell me ‘If they have colour, we reported them.’ My ears say, ‘If they have sound, it was we who gave notice of them.’ My nose says ‘If they have any smell, it was through me that they have passed into the mind.’ The sense of taste says, ‘If they have no taste, do not put your question to me.’ The sense of touch says ‘If it is not a body, I did not touch it, and If I did not touch it, I had no message to transmit.’
How, then, did these facts get into my memory? Where did they come from? I do not know. When I learned them, I did not believe them with another man’s mind. It was my own mind which recognized them and admitted that they were true. I entrusted them to my own mind as though it were a place of storage from which I could produce them at will. Therefore, they must have been in my mind even before I learned them, though not present to my memory. Then whereabouts in my mind were they? How was it that I recognized them when they were mentioned and agreed that they were true? It must have been that they were already in my memory, hidden away in its deep recesses, in so remote a part of it that I might not have been able to think of them at all, if some other person had not brought them to the fore by teaching me about them.
The memory also contains the innumerable principles and laws of numbers and dimensions. None of these can have been conveyed to it by means of the bodily senses, because they cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. I have heard the sounds of the words by which their meaning is expressed when they are discussed, but the words are one thing and the principles another. The words may sometimes be spoken in Latin and at other times in Greek, but the principles are neither Greek nor Latin. They are not language at all. I have seen lines drawn by architects, and they are sometimes as fine as the thread spun by spiders. But these principles are different. They are not images of things which the eye of my body has reported to me. We know them simply bye recognizing them inside ourselves without reference to any material object. With all the senses of my body I have become aware of numbers as they are used in counting things. But the principle of number, by which we count, is not the same. But the principle of number, by which we count, is not the same. It is not an image of things we count, but something which is there in its own right. If anyone is blind to it, he may laugh may words: I shall pity him for his ridicule.
The power of the memory is great, O Lord. It is awe-inspiring in its profound and incalculable complexity. Yet is it my mind: it is my self. What, then, am I, my God? What is my nature? A life that is every varying, full of change, and of immense power. The wide plains of my memory and its innumerable caverns and hollows are full beyond compute of countless things of all kinds. Material things are there by means of their images; knowledge is there of itself; emotions are there in the form of ideas or impressions of some kind, for the memory retains them even while the mind does not experience them, although whatever is in the memory must also be in the mind. My mind has the freedom of them all. I can glide from one to the other. I can probe deep into them and never find the end of them. This is the power of memory! This is the great force of life in living man, mortal though he is!
My God, my true Life, what, then, am I to do? I shall go beyond this force that is in me, this force which we call memory, so that I may come to you, my Sweetness and my Light. What have you to say to me? You are always there above me, and as I rise up towards you in my mind, I shall go beyond even this force which is in me, this force which we call memory, longing to reach out to you by the only possible means and to cling to you in the only way in which it is possible to cling to you. For beasts and birds also have memory: otherwise they could never find their lairs or nets or the many other things which are part of their habitual life. In fact, they could have no habits at all if it were not for their memory. So, I must go beyond memory too, if I am to reach the God who made me different from the beasts that walk on the earth and wiser than the birds that fly in the air. I must pass beyond memory to find you, my true Good, my sure Sweetness. But where will the search lead me? Where am I to find you? If I find you beyond my memory, it means that I have no memory of you. How, then, am I to find you, if I have no memory of you?”
drcelucienjoseph, "Thinking and Meditating" 