This morning I circle back to Professor C.H. Dodd's generative insight that by speaking in parables, Jesus is seeking to "tease our minds into active thought." More specifically, Dodd's illuminating definition in his book, Parables of the Kingdom (Scribner's, 1961), is this: "At its simplist the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application as to tease it into active thought." (page 5)

Jesus wants us to keep thinking, to be free to wonder, to be open to surprise, to be ready to welcome God's daily invitations to join in the work of love and liberation in the world--and in ourselves.

As today's light arrives, I am thinking further about the vital questions of how to teach about--and how to talk about--the centuries of chattel slavery in our shared American history. And I am thankful to Jamelle Bouie for his essay published yesterday in the New York Times, in which, like the wise and just householder of Matthew 13:52, he shows us competing narratives, both old and new, about what the oppression and torture of African-American slaves was like.

As Bouie points out, "it is exactly these questions of wording and emphasis that mark one of the differences between a modern, more truthful depiction of American slavery and an older, tendentious approach that either de-emphasized or ignored outright the basic injustice of human bondage in favor of a gloss that placed a more pleasant sheen on an otherwise horrific institution."

To give us a glimpse into a more truthful telling of our shared past, Bouie turns to a contemporary historian, Donald Yacovone, Associate Professor at the University of Edinburgh: “Until the mid-1960s,” the historian Donald Yacovone writes in “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity,” “American history instruction from grammar school to the university relentlessly characterized slavery as a benevolent institution, an enjoyable time and a gift to those Africans who had been lucky enough to be brought to the United States.”

Bouie concludes: "The history we teach to students in the present is as much about the country we hope to be as it is a record of the country we once were."

Thank you, Jamelle Bouie, for showing us how to trace the connections among our past, present, and future, and for "teasing our minds into active thought."

Previous entries in this week's series, "Hot Summer Reading: Precisely the Parables We Need Right Now!!!" can be found by clicking on the Earlier Reflections link at the top of this page.