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“To borrow a phrase from Zigmont Bielman, this global system results in “a new socio-cultural hierarchy, a worldwide scale” that correlates with the body’s racial and gender markers: “the darker your skin is, the less you earn; the shorter your lifespan, the poor or your health and nutrition, the less education you can get.” The darker your skin is, the more likely you are to be incarcerated, a refugee, and undocumented worker; the darker your skin is, the more likely you are to migrate for survival from one out post of empire to another. The darker your skin is, the more likely you are to become infected with HIV/AIDS; and, if you are a woman, the darker your skin is, the more likely you will bury your infant” -Enfleshing Freedom: body, race, and being by M. Shawn Copeland, pages 67-68.

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"When God heard the cries of the Israelites and recognized their oppression, God commisssioned Moses to go to the pharaoh and tell him to let the people of Israel go free. unsure of who this God was, and by what divine authority he could make demands of the pharaoh or even speak to the people of Israel, Moses asked God who precisely God was. He asked for the name of God, to which God responded, "I am who I am... say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you" (Exodus 3:14). in this proclamaition the freedom of God is asserted. Even as God has proclaimed that the Israelites are God's people, God's identity is not attached to the Israelites. to know the Isrealites is not to know God. God's identity is connected to God's very free movement in history. more importantly, God's identity is not a stagnant identity. God says: I am who I am. in the very use of a verb as a name, God clearly self-identifies as movement, an ongoing presence in history. in other words, God is to be known by the way in which God moves in the world. God is not to be known by being identified with any particular people. God may be with a people, and can best be seen from the vantage point that is theirs in a particular context, but God is not those people. That is, no one people can have an exclusive claim on God. in the end, the movement that is God's very identity is defined in terms of a deliverance from bondage into the freedom that is life. in giving Moses directions for setting the people of God free the identity of God is clarified. Essentially, the exodus story preserves the freedom of God, and as it does so it affirms the essence of God as Freedom."
-Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, page 160.

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"The witness was nineteen-year-old Rachel Jeantel. in pointing to the way Jeantel's phenotype became a source for scrutiny, implying to some a lack of credibility, one writer noted, "she is not tin or blond or demure." during her testimony it was as if she was not a witness, but the defendant. Her diction was mocked throughout the trial. One newspaper reportedly described it as "difficult-to-understand," "Cringe-worthy," and "humiliating." at one point in the trial, the prosecutor asked her if she understood English. She was further ridiculed for not being able to read cursive writing. By the end of her testimony the prosecutor with support from the media had successfully painted her as an uneducated black woman. that, however, was not the worst of it.
Because of her defiant way of responding to the prosecutor's badgering and her display of rightful indignation for the insults that were hurled at her by the prosecutor, she was portrayed in the media as an "Angry Black Woman." one online site, Smoking Gun, combed through her social media history and then proclaiamed her "not just a 'thug,' but proof the gene pool NEEDS more chlorine!" in his commentary on the media treatment of Jeantel, Orlando Sentinel reporter Darryl Owens spoke to the racialized construct that was being reinforced. He said, "Today, the Angry Black Woman is stitched into our racial fabric. In movies. On TV. In the media. She's mad as hell about everything, and she isn't going to take it anymore. And she's quick to lash offenders with her sharp tongue, fingerwagging, and eye rolling."
-Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, page 84-85.

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"When Catholics did not substitute the church for the Spirit, they substituted Mary. Yves Congar, the French theologian who wrote a three-volume work entitled I Believe in the Holy Spirit, gives interesting examples of this tendancy. Catholic devotional materials state that "Mary is spiritually present to guide and inspire"; that she "Forms Christ in believers"; and that she "links believers to Christ." A common expression urges believers "to Jesus through Mary." She is called the intercessor, the mediatrix, the helper. The Bible by contrast, gives these roles and titles to the Spirit. Pope Leo XIII, who wrote twelve encylcicals on the rosary, provides another example. in one encyclical he wrote, "Every grace granted to human beings has three degrees in order: from God it is communicated to Christ, from Christ it passes to the Virgin, and from the Virgin it descends to us." Here, as Congar observes, is a precise substitution of Mary for the Spirit in the trinitarian communication of grace to the world."
-Elizabeth A. Johnson, Abounding in Kindness, page 231.

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"And here is a Key point. Jesus research affects the imagination of faith about the true humanity of the Word mad flesh not by generalizing but by particularizing. Jesus of Nazareth is not a generic human being but a specific one. His human nature is not an abstraction but an expression of a concrete human life shaped by a real history in the world.  he is situated in time and place, namely, first-century Palestine. like everyone else he descends from a line of ancestors, in his case the people of Israel. He is Jewish, both culturally and religiously, and his worldview is fed by streams of that religious tradition. his human identity is shaped by his relationships to a quite specific family in a politically oppressed society. He is no stranger to the passions of red-blooded humanity but experiences the vagaries of the flesh in his own circumstances. Despite his many gifts he is limited in knowledge and needs to grow in self-awareness and discernment of his vocation. His career is not pre-programmed but the result of free decisions, not always easily made, about his ministry and its focus."
- Elizabeth A. Johnson, Abounding in Kindness, page 164.

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"The earthy image so lovingly shaped is not only touched and formed by God's hands, but also transformed by God's breath. 'flesh blossomed out of clay,' and even as that clay emerged 'glorious from God's hands,' flesh was even more glorious having received the breath of God. This breath was fiery, 'competent as it were to bake clay into a different quality, into flesh as though into earthenware...'
Flesh witnesses to its origins. Flesh carries within it the traces of its beginnings in another-- memories of primordial contact. The loving touch of God's hands as he shapes the earth is never forgotten. But neither is the mother's womb to which the flesh was once firmly attached. the flesh 'carries with it some part of the body from which it is torn,' Tertullian writes. it even bears traces of others who shaped her flesh. 'the flesh of Christ adheres not only to Mary, but also to David through Mary and to Jesse through David.' And thus the flesh weaves connections between humans-- Mary's flesh carrying all of them, even as the genealogies remember only fathers' names."
-Poetics of the Flesh, by Mayra Rivera, page 47.

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"The Giver of Life not only creates and conserves all things, holding them in existence over the abyss of nothingness, but is also the dynamic ground of their becoming, empowering from within their self-transcendence into new being. this is not a denial of divine omnipotence, but its redefinition. the Spirit of God moves in the world with compassionate love that grants nature its own creativity and humans their own freedom, all the while companioning them through the terror of history toward a new future... we should no longer think of God as having a set plan for the evolving universe, but rather a vision. this vision aims at bringing into being a community of love. the Creator Spirit is at the heart of the process, guiding the world in that direction, all the while inviting the world to participate in its own creation through the free working of its own systems."
- Elizabeth A. Johnson, Abounding in Kindness, page 93.

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"'God guides his chosen children along strange paths. this is a strange path and an honorable path and a holy path that God himself went on, that a person suffers pain without sin and without shame.' This 'strange path' is granted to those beloved by the Father so they will resemble His beloved Son, who was also tormented in body and soul. When Mechthild complains that she is subject to scorn and persecution, as well as physical pain and poverty, Christ consoles her: 'I am in you, and you are in me.' But, perhaps like most people, Mechthild does not find this entirely satisfying. she is a good guide because she is honest about her feelings of frustration. Christ gives her another teaching by using his own suffering as a model of endurance: in his vulnerability to raging enemies, shameful poverty, and violent death he trusted in the Father's goodness. He instructs Mechthild to do likewise. this somewhat bracing encouragement disentangles suffering from shame and prods her to accept whatever comes to her with courage and confidence in the goodness of God."
-Wendy Farley, The Thirst of God, page 67.

I have a hard time with this imagery because it can be so easily abused. Women and slaves were oppressed for centuries because of imagery like this. "don't leave your husband who gets drunk and beats you... endure because it is God's will." "Slaves continue to serve your masters in complete obedience. your suffering is only on this earth and is but a speck on eternity." I did not like the imagery of this message at all. I can see what she is getting at that suffering is not necessarily a punishment and is not inherently sinful, but this seems to give abusers the go ahead.

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"I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine." -Sarah page 10 The Invention of Wings

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"How could you? He'd usurped any chance I had for personal retribution." Sarah page 132 The Invention of Wings

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"For our whole life falls into three parts. In the first we exist, in the second we grow and in the third we are completed. the first is nature, the second is mercy, the third is grace. as for the first, I saw and understood that the great power of the Trinity is our father and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our lord; and we have all this by nature adn in our essential being. and furthermore, I saw that as the second Person is mother of our essential being, so the same well-loved Person is mother of our sensory being; for God makes us double, as essential and sensory beings. Our essential being is the higher part, which we have in our father, God Almighty; and the second Person of the Trinity is our mother in nature and in our essential creation, in whom we are grounded and rooted, and he is our mother in mercy in taking on our sensory being. And so our Mother, in whom our parts are kept unparted, works in us in various ways; for in our Mother, Christ, we profit and grow, and in mercy he reforms and resores us, and through the power of his Passion and his death and rising again, he unites us to our essential being. this is how our Mother mercifully acts to all his children who are submissive and obedient to him."
- Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, page 138.

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"My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round." -Hetty page 201 The Invention of Wings

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Twice Scorned: Sound of Silence painting by Christel Roelandt

Handful's Wisdom: Royalty Free Shackles clip art by John Woodcock.

Sarah's Awakening: Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave engraving by William Blake

The Thirst of God: Mechthild Von Magdeburg painting. Artist unknown, Public Domain.

Jesus as Our Mother: Jesus was a Woman picture by Katie Murphy Penry

Giver of Life: The Whole World in His Hands by SaviourMachine

Word Became Flesh: The Words of Jesus by Juan Osborne

Mary, The Holy Spirit: Virgin of the Immaculate Conception by unknown ca. 1690

Black Bodies Silenced: Picture of Rachel Jeantel taken by Jacob Langston during the trial.

God Belongs to No One: Meme of Christ artwork assembled by Emmy Keggler.

Darker in Empire: photograph titled “An Empire of poverty” by Andrew Marshall

DNA of the Flesh: Painting titled: "Mold Me, Make Me" by Alan Hicks