Realizing that he was going to have to preach in the morning, the pastor began thinking of what he would say to his largely black congregation called Community of Hope outside of Washington, D.C. Many in the congregation have lost loved ones to gun violence, and are simultaneously grieving and seething from what is being widely experienced in the black community as an injurious miscarriage of justice.
"I knew I would be wearing my hoodie while preaching," Lee said, "and I wrote to all the pastoral staff that hoodies are welcome."As church communities gather on the Sunday after the "not guilty" verdict in one of the most racially fraught trials in recent memory, black pastors are offering both pastoral and prophetic responses from their pulpits.
Lee is preaching on the topic "Where Do We Go From Here," in which he uses the Martin Luther King Jr. speech of the same title."I wanted Martin speaking on Martin," the pastor said in a phone conversation with The Huffington Post. "When King gave that speech, he was speaking to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and so he was using a Christian framework to talk about systemic problems with the United States. And King ends that speech with a call for the United States to be born again."
Lee's scripture lesson is about the stoning of Stephen, a young man who is considered an early martyr for the Christian faith."There has always been backlash, there was backlash with the early Christian movement with the killing of Stephen, but there in the crowd witnessing was Saul who later became Paul," Lee explained. "We have seen great movement forward in America, but there is always backlash. We just cannot use this as an excuse, but as a motivation to keep moving forward. There is a great pain but there continue to be seeds of hope that our nation that can be born again."
Rev. Mike McBride will also be wearing a hoodie with the words "Alive And Free" while preaching at his West Berkeley, Calif. hands free access, The Way Christian Center.Preaching on the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8, McBride plans to connect the scripture's reference to the broken body of Jesus and the mutilation of the Ethiopian to the plight of young African men and the poor in America.
"I want to talk about black bodies that have been mutilated and hurt but to remind the congregation that we do have good news and that power is to make us whole," McBride said. "The role of faith is to open the possibility of redemption in the lives of those that are broken, and I want to challenge our congregations to step into that role."
But congregants that show up at McBride's church will not only be getting a sermon, but also a training. "We will be organizing people right there during the service for direct action," he said. "We are going to be talking about humanizing the dehumanized and amplifying the value of life for all people, but especially our young black men."
McBride has been working on an anti-violence campaign called "Lifelines to Healing" that works on gun violence and gun policy. "Going forward we are thinking about targeting the 'Stand Your Ground' laws that are largely used against African-Americans," he said. "We need to talk about how the justice system continues to fail black bodies."
When Emma Marcegaglia was four or five years old, she recalls playing a game of dolls with her brother Antonio, her fellow heir to Italy’s Marcegaglia steel multinational. “We’d say this doll is head of the commercial office, this is the head of production. I had all of these dolls working instead of making a party with cakes,” she says with a burst of laughter.
It is telling that Ms Marcegaglia’s passion for business was present well before she became co-chief executive of the Marcegaglia group, making her Italy’s most high-profile businesswoman and earning her the moniker “Italy’s iron lady”.
Her four-year term at Confindustria ended in early 2012. Having slipped out of the spotlight for a year – during which she took up yoga and martial arts – Ms Marcegaglia is back in the public eye this month as she becomes president of Business Europe, the region’s largest lobby representing 41 business associations, 20m companies and 120m people.
“The idea is to become the voice of business in Europe and to be constructively outspoken. If we come up against the position of the [European] Commission, then that’s not a problem for me,” she says with a glint of that famous steeliness.
Seated in the all-white decor of her study in Milan, she is wearing her signature spectacles, a fitted blue dress, diamond earrings and strappy heels. Her long blonde hair is expensively coloured. It is a classic model of Milanese power-dressing for the city’s steamy summer.
Ms Marcegaglia considers her greatest achievement at Confindustria striking an agreement with unions to negotiate contracts on a plant-by-plant level. It was the first big change in 60 years to Italy’s tradition of collective bargaining. Business leaders and entrepreneurs weakened by globalisation and the sovereign debt crisis welcomed the move. Unionists feared it made workers vulnerable but were brought around.
At Business Europe, Ms Marcegaglia plans another strike for business by taking on what she calls the “Brussels bubble”.
“The crisis is still here, we have to say that. We need growth and the crisis will be finished when growth returns. Growth comes from private entrepreneurs and we have a problem of competitiveness in Europe, a very big problem and we need to tackle this point.”
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