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<br>Visionaires,<br><br>Over Christmas, I was wandering through Barnes & Noble when I saw a copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which I had never read. I bought it, thinking that it might come in handy if I ever found myself in the company of people who believe that slavery was, on the whole, a pretty good deal for the slaves and a conductor of virtue for slaveholders. Just in case.<br><br>I realized last night that February is Black History Month -- as if all of African-American history could or should be crammed into a single month, although I suppose it gets it out of the way for the Anglo-American History devotees. But it occurred to me that much of what I was reading spoke not only to the obvious theme of slavery, but also to the issue of justice and charity overall, and justice and charity to undocumented immigrants in particular. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has taken some knocks from enlightened, 20-th and 21st-century readers offended by Harriet Beecher Stowe's rendering of slave dialect, as well as the seeming passivity of Uncle Tom, a Christian slave sold under dreadful circumstances to a slave trader who muses early on in the book that someday, he'll settle his accounts with the Good Lord -- after he concludes his man-stealing business. Nonetheless, and I say this as someone who has seriously studied Black history for decades, this book has had an undeniably positive effect on American history and is, even today, a blistering argument against those who would revere the "harmonious existence" of slaves and Christian patriarchs in the antebellum South.<br><br>I'll be offering some quotes and perspectives from the book here on Vision, and I also have a proposal for Douglas Wilson and his elders and Logos School board members. I will donate 25 copies of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to Logos School to aid them in what I'm sure is their goal of a proper, true, and comprehensive teaching of American history. I will also gift Douglas Wilson with the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, a compendium of correspondence from free and enslaved Black women in the South called "We Are Your Sisters," and a book chronicling the evangelical Quaker beginnings of the abolitionist and other social reform movements in the United States, "Mothers of Feminism" by Margaret Hope Bacon.<br><br>Because I don't for a moment believe that our paleo-Confederate local pastor can seriously argue that his Christian witness and fidelity to the Gospel is enhanced by his pro-slavery testimony and affiliation with The League of The South, I invite him in all sincerity to avail himself of my offer. I ask only that he respond, and respond publicly on Vision 2020, regardless of the content of that response or not.<br><br style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">"I will take the measuring line of justice and the plumb line of righteousness to check the foundation wall you have built. Your refuge looks strong, but since it is made of lies, a hailstorm will knock it down. Since it is made of deception, the enemy will come like a flood to sweep it away . . . " </span> Isaiah 28:17<br><br>Indeed, to quote Pastor Rob Bell, a Gospel that is not good news for everyone isn't good news for anyone.<br><br>Keely<br><br><br /><hr />Make distant family not so distant with Windows Vista® + Windows Live™. <a href='http://www.microsoft.com/windows/digitallife/keepintouch.mspx?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_CPC_VideoChat_distantfamily_012008' target='_new'>Start now!</a></body>
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