Featured Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Ellen Morris Prewitt

Are You a Scapegoater?

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on December 9, 2021. Posted in Featured, GOD, Racism to Reconciliation. 4 Comments

Yesterday, we completed Week 2 of the Mississippi Episcopal Church’s Anti-Racism and Racial Reconciliation training. Click here to read about Week 1 of this 4 week training. What did I learn this week (other than, apparently, my voice doesn’t stand out in a large Zoom group, and I have a short temper about that?) Words Matter When...

Anti-Racism for Advent

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on December 2, 2021. Posted in Featured, General, GOD, Racism to Reconciliation. 4 Comments

This Advent, my husband and I are participating in Anti-Racism and Racial Reconciliation training. If this seems an odd choice, remember that my turn towards anti-racism began with the Memphis School of Servant Leadership, a religious organization. This training is offered by the Episcopal Church in Mississippi. We meet once a week for four weeks....

A Game of Inches

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on October 13, 2021. Posted in Featured, General, Writing. 6 Comments

It’s a game of inches. Or at least it has been for me. Other writers, they decide to write a novel and voila! It’s published before I can get my first cup of tea in the morning. My latest endeavor began in 2004. I don’t know how many inches that is in days, but I think an inchworm could have circled the globe with how long I’ve...

What’s Your Invisible Wind?

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on August 5, 2021. Posted in Featured, General, Racism to Reconciliation. 6 Comments

White privilege is like riding the bike down the beach in Waveland. There’s an incline as the land rises toward Bay St. Louis, but it’s a basically easy ride. You pedal along. The Gulf is to your right, the lovely houses to your left. The temperature is okay, not beating down hot. You can feel it in your thighs, the exertion, but it’s...

Can America be the Land of the Brave?

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on July 6, 2021. Posted in Featured, General, GOD, Racism to Reconciliation. 8 Comments

Y’all know this story, right? About how King David of Israel saw a woman bathing and asked who she was. David’s advisors told him she was the wife of Uriah, one of David’s soldiers. David’s messengers “brought Bathsheba to him.” They had sex. David then arranged for her husband Uriah to be killed in battle...

Nekkid People

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on June 6, 2021. Posted in Featured, General, GOD. 4 Comments

This morning in church I was a lay reader for the first time in my life. You usually have to go through training or some such before they let you stand at the head of the church at the heavily-carved lectern with a microphone in front of you and read the word of God—we say that after the reading, intone it, actually: “The Word of God.”...

The Mississippi that Might Still Be

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on June 28, 2020. Posted in Featured, General, Racism to Reconciliation. 2 Comments

When I heard that Mississippi during this massive moment of potential change was focusing on its racist flag, at first I thought, oh, dear Lord —that’s what Mississippians think matters now? But. I lose count when I try to say how many generations I’ve been from Mississippi (’cause, you know, we’re not very good at...

I Would Have Been A Confederate Soldier

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on August 17, 2017. Posted in Featured, General, Racism to Reconciliation. 16 Comments

If I had lived during the 1860s, I probably would’ve done exactly what my mother’s grandfather did. Cursing, I would’ve picked up a gun and left my Mississippi family to protect my homeland. I would’ve fully understood I was fighting for a cause I did not support—preserving the right to own people. But the irresistible...

How to Fail at the Race Talk

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on August 2, 2016. Posted in Featured, General, GOD, HOMELESSNESS, LOVE, Racism to Reconciliation. 4 Comments

I failed at the conference for racial justice this weekend. I gave racially tinged advice to a perfectly innocent question that had no race element to it. I mistook one African-American woman with glasses and short hair for a different African-American woman with glasses and short hair, because all African-Americans look alike to us white folks. Multiple...

First, There is Racism

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on June 19, 2015. Posted in Featured, Racism to Reconciliation. 12 Comments

When my husband and I built our house at Pickwick Lake, we built it into the high bluffs that circle the lake. In order for this to work, the architect had to take steel beams and drive them through the shifting mud until he hit bedrock. The house was thus anchored and then built around these beams. I keep thinking of this image as I ponder the...