I’m being tested on this one this morning. 
I found this very moving. (King Alfonso of the Congo was an African convert to Roman Catholicism.)
"Each day the traders are kidnapping our people. This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for our masses. It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves. The captives are branded with a red-hot iron. "
-Letter from King Alfonso I of the Kongo to King Joao III of Portugal (1526)
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Color me with damp eyes.
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From How to do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell:
End of Chapter 1: The Case for Nothing –
Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”) 30 . To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.”
Of course, such a solution isn’t good for business, nor can it be considered particularly innovative. But in the long meantime, as I sit in the deep bowl of the Rose Garden, surrounded by various human and nonhuman bodies, inhabiting a reality interwoven by myriad bodily sensitivities besides my own—indeed, the very boundaries of my own body overcome by the smell of jasmine and just-ripening blackberry—I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable detail of the real.
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Another bit from Wendell Berry, “The Need to be Whole”
… starting with a quote from a California Native American called “Bill”.
Everything is living, even the rocks, even the bench you are sitting on. . . . Everything is alive. That’s what we Indians believe. White people think everything is dead.
That seems to me, for one thing, to be a fairly complete criticism of the European occupation of America so far—at least in its so far dominant version. As evidence, we treat the soil of our farmlands and working forests, not to mention all land to be “developed,” as if it were dead; we treat living farm animals in confinement as if they are dead; we look upon whatever is unwanted or in our way, from “fetuses” to technologically obsolete workers and farmers to mountains and forests, as if they are dead already or might as well be dead. People true to the present time will conclude as a matter of course that Bill was talking religion or, more likely, superstition. But he was speaking merely of reality as he and his people knew it.
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Speaking of Wendell Berry:
Enemies
If you are not to become a monster,
you must care what they think.
If you care what they think,
how will you not hate them,
and so become a monster
of the opposite kind? From where then
is love to come—love for your enemy
that is the way of liberty?
From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go
free of you, and you of them;
they are to you as sunlight
on a green branch. You must not
think of them again, except
as monsters like yourself,
pitiable because unforgiving.
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“Oh! How heavily the weight of slavery pressed upon me then. I must toil day after day, endure abuse and taunts and scoffs, sleep on the hard ground, live on the coarsest fare, and not only this, but live the slave of a blood-seeking wretch, of whom I must stand henceforth in continued fear and dread. Why had I not died in my young years before God had given me children to love and live for?”
“The goodness of God was manifest, he declared, in my miraculous escape from the swamp. As Daniel came forth unharmed from the den of lions, and Jonah had been preserved in the whale’s belly, even so had I been delivered from evil by the Almighty.”
-Solomon Northrup, author of “12 Years a Slave”
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Just saw this in Apple News within the last 30 minutes 
:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/15/georgetown-jesuits-enslaved-sold/
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I saw that before. Very sad. The better churches are starting to acknowledge their complicity in the slave trade.
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“Times were so desperate along these days. All I did was to call on the Lord, ‘Lord, save me, save me Lord.’ He saved me, and that is why I trust him today.”
-unknown enslaved person
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I just read this last night 
:
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Interesting article. Thanks for posting.
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Any reservations I might have had about CRT have been lessened. 
Thanks for the info. I assumed that if I did a post about Juneteenth it would disappear.