Carol M. Arney’s Interview with the Rev. Norio Sasaki, March 2, 1995.
8. Carol M. Arney, The Episcopate of the Rt. Rev. Harry S. Kennedy, Bishop of the Missionary District of Honolulu, 1944 to 1969 (Honors Paper, The School of Theology, University of the South, 1995), 45–46.
9. Malcolm Boyd and Paul Conrad, When in the Course of Human Events (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1973), 22–23.
10. Malcolm Boyd, “Maybe most important . . . you,” e-mail message to author, December 21, 2009.
11. Boyd and Conrad, When in the Course of Human Events, 34–35.
12. Malcolm Boyd, “Have finished chapter,” e-mail message to author, January 13, 2010.
13. Malcolm Boyd, “Big News,” e-mail message to author, August 17, 2009.
14. Malcolm’s handwritten letter to “Rob,” October 20, 2010.
15. Malcolm Boyd, “Rosebud,” e-mail to author, February 17, 2009.
16. Malcolm Boyd, “Post-Thursday thoughts,” e-mail message to author, August 14, 2009.
17. Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 21.
18. Michael Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1997); The Wisdom of Desmond Tutu (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000); and Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me (New York: Seabury Press 2009).
19. Tutu’s undated handwritten speeches, “Perspectives in Black and White.” Tutu illustrates further with this story: “A little boy excitedly pointed to a flight of geese and shouted, ‘Mummy, Mummy, look at all those goose.’ ‘My darling,’ Mummy replied, ‘we don’t call them gooses. They are geese.’ Then the little darling, nothing daunted, retorted, ‘Well they still look like goose to me.’”
20. Malcolm Boyd, “In Response to Dennis Ford,” e-mail message, February 3, 2011.
21. Boyd and Conrad, When in the Course of Human Events, 26–27.
22. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (San Francisco: HarperSan- Francisco, 1993), 119.
23. When I attended a conference in 2002, Apiwa Mucherera, assistant professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, phrased this as a “Here we go again” mentality in which one may dismiss the other before she even speaks.
24. Patricia Cranton, Becoming an Authentic Teacher in Higher Education (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company, 2001), 43.
25. Jack Mezirow and Associates, Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 20.
26. Boyd and Conrad, When in the Course of Human Events, 14–15.
27. The following educational theorists contributed deeply to the integration of service learning into the academy: John Dewey, Jean Piaget, David Kolb, and Paulo Freire. See C. W. Kinsley and K. McPherson, eds., Enriching the Curriculum through Service Learning (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1995).
28. Malcolm Boyd, “Black Horse of Famine,” e-mail message to author, September 4, 2009.
29. Malcolm Boyd, “The Book,” e-mail message to author, July 22, 2009.
Running with the Horses
If you have raced with foot-runners
and they have wearied you,
how will you compete with horses?
(Jeremiah 12:5)
In light of the title of this book, Malcolm’s life reimagines the four horsemen of the Apocalypse described in the Bible. In the book of Revelation, chapter 6, ride the four horsemen of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The image of the four horsemen gives shape to the chapters of this biography. After the glowing accolades of Malcolm already mentioned in the foreword and introduction, why this dark tone and chapter structure to describe Malcolm’s life? Simply put, the four riders of the Apocalypse help me to connect the dots of Malcolm’s deeply textured and nuanced life. Malcolm’s life seems symmetrically organized around the continuing apocalyptic threats that still wreak havoc on planet earth. Before we look at the four horsemen and how they correspond to Malcolm’s life, a short story is in order. The primary imagery and metaphor of the four horsemen invites the reader into the apocalyptic presence that Malcolm often brought to his audience.
The questioner was a girl, about twenty, with somber brown hair, big droopy eyes, and a thin-line quivering mouth. She was sitting, straightbacked and intent, in the Dwight Hall Common Room at Yale University beneath the tapestries and heavy architecture which make the room seem smaller than it is.
She was pleading with Malcolm, who was sipping coffee as the week’s guest sermonizer must at the coffee hour. What she wanted, and what everyone wants out of Malcolm, was an answer—something solid, a bedrock to refer to when everything else is crumbling. She wanted a bright light, a quick conversion, a truth.
She was looking earnestly to Malcolm probably because she had read his “prayer book”—Are You Running with Me, Jesus?—and knew his struggle was hers. She asked the short, almost bullet-shaped priest what were his “absolutes.”
Malcolm’s answer was simple and misleading.“God, I guess, and community, and probably Jesus.” One might think he meant heavenly father, sacred church, and holy son, if one didn’t hear what followed.
“But I can’t believe love and justice are absolutes, although I once did. This morning I read about Orange-burg, South Carolina. The Orangeburg massacre occurred on February 8, 1968, when nine South Carolina Highway Patrol officers fired into a crowd protesting local segregation. Three men were killed and twenty-eight more were injured (mostly shots in their backs). After the massacre, two others were injured by police. And a pregnant woman later had a miscarriage due to being beaten. The Orangeburg massacre predates other major civil rights revolts such as the Kent State shootings and the Jackson State deaths.”
Because of these violent contexts, Malcolm’s jolting candor bars him from handing out easy answers to the hung-up. He can’t talk about heavenly father or sacred church because he doesn’t understand them in terms of “crisis ” or “napalm.” He didn’t even want to climb the Battell pulpit in Yale’s chapel earlier that morning, because he couldn’t see the reason why he should be up there. He’s too impatient to cope with boring liturgy, unheard music, and velvet-laden gowns.
Two weeks earlier in New York, Readers’ Digest, of all groups, sponsored a discussion of “religion in a world of change,” whatever that means, and Malcolm was
