Practices of Freedom and Justice

       Hello all! This is Serelle McPherson coming to you with another blog for your educational growth. Last week in Freshman Seminar we had a lecture by Dr. Orton B. Pollard III. The title of the session was Practices of Freedom and Justice: Representative Thinkers.
       The lecture began with the usual biography of the speaker. Dr. Pollard works in the school of Divinity as the Dean of Students and as the Director of Programs of Black Church Studies.
       The lesson, even though it was geared towards freedom and justice, also had a great background in religion. Dr. Pollard let us know that religion is his forte. He defines religion as that phenomenon that describes the encounters between people and the sacred, or divine. He also let us know that everyone has an opinion on religion, but that most people rarely know what they're talking about. The idea of religion and the topic of freedom and justice became tied together when Dr. Pollard said:
       "People of African descent are more likely to be religious than other cultures."
       I greatly agree with this because as a person of African descent, I am perfectly aware that people in this culture have always gone through a lot and they use religion as a therapy to get through the trials of life.
       Our history doesn't start with the instances of enslavement as people often try to portray, but it goes back waty further. In times of earlier life back in the homeland, people still practiced religion, it was just in the form of traditional African religious practices. When Africans were enslaved, it wasn't the beginning of their problems, it was just the greatest and the longest lasting.
       Being in this new country, Africans entered with their own beliefs, but due to a difference of languages, this was broken. Since the African diaspora has been in existence, there have been fights of freedom and justice that we have been in battle for. The two mean totally different things, but they often work hand in hand. Dr. Pollard introduced a relationship between freedom and justice when he took us through a time line of the changing definition of the word freedom. When we were being enslaved, freedom meant a means of getting away. When we were fighting for our civil rights, freedom meant equal opportunity. And now as we are people living in the 21st century, freedom simply means getting justice.
       Dr. Pollard ended off the session by introducing three people:

• Jarena Lee: the first African American to write a religious autobiography.
• Sojourner Truth: religious soldier who helped slaves run to the north. 
• Howard Thurman: helped found the first racially integrated, multicultural church in the United States.