The co-edited books that I have written: Part 2

At an academic conference at the University of Texas at Dallas!

Year: 2010

In my presentation, I discussed the concept of Négritude in the poetry of Léopold Sedar Senghor.

Happy New Year, Friends🎆🎊🎈 !

“The Year” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of a year.

From “A Poem for Every Winter Day”

I want to wish you a happy last Sunday of December and the final Sunday of 2025! May it be filled with reflection, gratitude, and hope for the year ahead.

I am not sure if these Parisian photos of mine go together with this post; oh well, I feel like posting them because Paris is one of my favorite places to visit—especially the Louvre museum—and that I didn’t take any international trips this year. Lol

Paris, je me souviens; Ayiti m sonje w😊 🇫🇷 🧳

I always enjoy getting a fresh haircut. I look twenty years younger now! 😆

The following paragraph are taken from my forthcoming biography of Jean Price-Mars (“For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good: A Biography of Jean Price-Mars”: Vanderbilt University Press, 2026). It engages Price-Mars’s personal faith and religious sensibilities.

“My biography of Jean Price-Mars also analyzes his personal faith and religious responsibilities—if any can be clearly identified. Rather than affirming a firm personal commitment or piety to a specific religious tradition or creed, it is more suggestive to speak of Price-Mars’s religious curiosity. Yet Price-Mars’s deep interest in religion perhaps reflects his psychological conflict to reconcile the Christian faith of his father and grandmother with what he himself described as the “ancestral faith” or the “popular religion” of the Haitian people. He may have experienced a crisis of faith in his formative years as a university student in Paris, where he was exposed to a wide array of intellectual traditions, competing epistemologies, and France’s increasingly assertive non-theistic humanism and radical secularism, along with the country’s “progressive turn-away” from its Christian heritage.

Price-Mars’s turn to “Black Africa” through Vodou was a strategic intellectual and cultural pathway, through which he sought connection, psychological relief, and resolution to a profound crisis of faith and identity. As an emerging Haitian intellectual in his early twenties, struggling to understand his ancestral roots or heritage, he experienced a multifaceted crisis that was at once religious, cultural, intellectual, historical, and psychological. In this sense, for Price-Mars, Haitian Vodou as a living religious system and symbol of ancestral memory functioned as a mediating force that helped bridge religious dissonance, cultural alienation, historical rupture, and psychological disruption. By adopting an anthropological approach to Vodou, Price-Mars mobilized the ancestral faith of the Haitian people as a central instrument in his nation-building and cultural nationalism project, seeking to unify Haiti’s diverse social groups whose lives, aspirations, and collective imagination had been fractured by the American military occupation and U.S. imperialism in Haiti. In this sense, Price-Mars may be understood as strategically employing Vodou as a religious system and anthropology as a scientific discipline in advancing a coherent political, cultural, and nation-building agenda.”

–Joseph, Celucien L., “For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good: A Biography of Jean Price-Mars” (Vanderbilt University Press, 2026), pp. 43-4.

“The Moral Crisis at the Heart of the Nation”

If there is one significant and deeply practical virtue this country is lacking, it is empathy. Closely behind it are compassion, hospitality, and kindness. The soul of this nation is wounded, hardened by fear, division, and indifference to suffering. As a people, we cannot continue living as though cruelty and xenophobia are strengths or silence is neutrality. A society that loses its capacity to feel the pain of others ultimately loses its humanity, and no nation on earth can survive that loss unscathed. We are not the exception!

As a nation, we cannot continue living as if policies can replace conscience or power can substitute for human care and dignity. Without a renewed ethical commitment to one another and to the stranger and the most vulnerable in our midst, democracy itself becomes hollow and human virtues become a thing of the past. Healing will require us to slow down, listen deeply, and recover the courage to care again.

Finally, we must remember that what is declared legal by human courts is not always just in the sight of God. Law may permit what conscience forbids, and judicial decisions may comply with statutes while violating the deeper demands of love, mercy, and empathy. True justice is measured not only by legality, but by how well it honors the sacred dignity of every man and woman, every boy and girl, of every race and nation, and by how faithfully it protects the vulnerable among us and to act with compassion.

To the Zoom Meeting
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/89696081004?pwd=FftEV37P34FvH1tkvr4v77AXnWqlY5.1

Meeting ID: 896 9608 1004
Passcode: B0L3T6

“The Paradox of Heroism in the Modern World”

Heroism is not defined by one’s religion, nationality, or race. Heroes and sheroes take many forms: a Muslim teacher, a Hindu mechanic, a Christian basketball coach, or a Vodou physician. At its best, heroism is expressed through deliberate acts of kindness and empathy, a commitment to human dignity and development, and the consistent courage to challenge the existing order and transform unjust social systems and practices.

In this sense, heroes inspire others to become their best, to stretch boundaries, and to recognize sacrifice in service of the common good and human flourishing. They do not act for glory or self-interest; rather, they are driven by a passion to help people flourish and to contribute to the improvement of the human condition and the shared human experience.

Yet heroism, as it functions in global history and public memory, does not always align with such moral or ethical commitments toward life, politics, diplomatic relations, social issues, etc. Heroes are often produced by events, circumstances, and social narratives rather than by a consistent posture toward justice and human rights for all people. One may be celebrated as a hero by one’s people, race, or tribe, while simultaneously being viewed as a villain or enemy by another. Some are elevated because they resist oppression and confront unjust treatment of others; paradoxically, other individuals are made heroes for the very opposite reasons: using power and influence to oppress, to inflict suffering on marginalized communities, or to exploit the underrepresented in order to preserve privilege, dominance, and honor for their own group.