Where Are Your Scars?

Can one enter Heaven without scars? The author raises this question and depicts some of the scars inflicted upon Black Americans during, perhaps, their most vulnerable period in American history, the Post-Reconstruction Era. These brutal scars were inflicted through the stark nakedness of physical, economic, social, and legal terror; and they ran to the bone of the soul. Though ridiculed by some twentieth century Black scholars, the author argues the Black Church was the only institution to which the community could find haven. Out of THE CHURCH came the faith, hope, and strength to face the daily struggle of life without dying. Just as Black Americans came through slavery and not from slavery, Where Are Your Scars? is an invitation to understand how the community came out of the wilderness to "the place for which our fathers sighed."

-- Rev. Lawrence P Lakey