Ken is pleased to welcome Lisa Sharon Harper and her new groundbreaking book, Fortune - How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All. It all began with the results of her submission of DNA to ancestry.com. Lisa learned of her Nigerian roots - and ancestry that extends all the way back to the onset of slavery in America in the 1600s. Lisa shares her story of awakenings, which began when she became a Christian as a high school student in Young Life. She soon learned that her new faith was inextricably linked to white Republican politics - her activist mother was horrified. At Rutgers, as an undergraduate, she was active in Campus Crusade for Christ. She encountered the writings of John Perkins. In her book, Lisa traces the history of her family tree including the Lawrences, the Weeks, and the Fortune Magee Game born in 1689. Her family lived with the heavy consequence of race laws that governed slavery and defined "whiteness" as they were written over 300 years. Jesus, Lisa reminds us, was not white, he was brown, indigenous, and colonized - and killed by Empire. Lisa has a great insight into "white fragility" - it's worse. Resistance has been weaponized. Lisa traveled with "Nuns on the Bus," uncovering the roots of the MAGA narrative. SHOW NOTES
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From Ferguson to New York, and from Germany and South Africa to Australia and Brazil, Lisa Sharon Harper leads trainings that increase clergy and community leaders’ capacity to organize people of faith toward a just world. A prolific speaker, writer and activist, Ms. Harper is the founder and president of FreedomRoad.us, a consulting group dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap in our nation by designing forums and experiences that bring common understanding, common commitment and common action.
Ms. Harper is the author of several books, including Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican…or Democrat (The New Press, 2008); Left Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Elevate, 2011); Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith (Zondervan, 2014); and the critically acclaimed, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong can be Made Right (Waterbrook, a division of Penguin Random House, 2016). The Very Good Gospel, recognized as the “2016 Book of the Year” by Englewood Review of Books, explores God’s intent for the wholeness of all relationships in light of today’s headlines.
A columnist at Sojourners Magazine and an Auburn Theological Seminary Senior Fellow, Ms. Harper has appeared on TVOne, FoxNews Online, NPR, and Al Jazeera America. Her writing has been featured in CNN Belief Blog, The National Civic Review, Sojourners, The Huffington Post, Relevant Magazine, and Essence Magazine. She writes extensively on shalom and governance, immigration reform, health care reform, poverty, racial and gender justice, climate change, and transformational civic engagement.
Drawing on her lifelong journey to know her family’s history, leading Christian activist Lisa Sharon Harper recovers the beauty of her heritage, exposes the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and casts a vision for collective repair.
Fortune helps readers understand how America was built upon systems and structures in ways that blessed some and cursed others, allowing Americans of European descent to benefit from the colonization, genocide, enslavement, rape, and exploitation of people of color.
More Pending
