August 21, 2026

Backs Against The Wall

Many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs constantly against the wall.

Howard Thurman wrote these words in 1949 in the introduction to Jesus and the Disinherited, a book he built around a question his grandmother once asked him about what the religion of Jesus actually offered people who had almost nothing. Thurman had spent his life as a Black minister and mystic moving through a segregated America, watching how the promise of belonging was extended to some and withheld from others. He wrote for the dispossessed, the poor, the disinherited, anyone who has ever stood in a room, a job, or a country and felt a wall at their back. Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have carried a worn copy of this book with him during the Montgomery bus boycott, because Thurman had found in Jesus's own outsider status a case for why belonging is a birthright and not a reward.