On April 4-5, 2025, Dr. Joanne Braxton, President of the Braxton Institute, was honored to join a distinguished panel of experts at the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s historic public hearing on the enduring legacy of racial terror lynchings.
Dear One - A Poem Dedicated to My Fellow Survivors of Racial Violence
Nicole Oxendine: Featured Poet
Let us ask our ancestors — all who have made this road by walking before us — to be here, today & always. As Chrystos* reminds us — we walk in the history of our people. Those of our blood & those of our belonging. Some whose names we know & many whose names only whisper in the mysteries. We invite all who have served us with their experience, wisdom, strength & their longing. We are their wildest dreams & we are grateful for their conjuring.
White Supremacy: What's Religion Got to Do With It?
“Everything!” people exclaim when I tell them I’m teaching a course this semester for ministerial students called “White Supremacy: What’s Religion Got to Do with It?” We see it in the prayer rally the night before the January 6 attack, to the insurrectionists storming the Capitol with flags for Trump and Jesus. White supremacy is evident in the presence of right-wing Christians on the Supreme Court, the election of a stalwart Christian Nationalist as Speaker of the House, and the disturbing rise of explicit white Christian Nationalism in U.S. life in our news cycles.
Our Circles of Care: An Inside View
People who know me well, know that I have conflicted feelings about my profession. As a black woman and a doctor, I am both aware of how important my work is and how powerful it is for patients to see someone like me in this position. However, as a sensitive person, it is hard to know that I am part of a broken national healthcare system and feel powerless to change things.
Harm Protection Spell
A reflection: to have your body the subject of national moral panic is both odd and familiar.
It’s odd because one’s body–the very fact of its existence or your relationship with it–should be uncontroversial. The intimacy of one’s self-concept, self-identification, and self-determination is so obvious that it should not invite public scrutiny.
From the Library of Congress, featuring our CEO and President of the Board Rev. Joanne M. Braxton, PhD: "At the Crossroads of Health and Spirituality."
"The 'Tree of Life' project examines the ways in which people of African descent create pathways to achieve resiliency and sustain health through their responses to the legacies and impacts of slavery and structural inequality. Scholars suggest that spirituality emerges as a protective factor for physical and social well-being (Chao 2010; Crowther, et. al. 2004). What can be learned from the legacies and traditions of African American communities as sources of survival and healing for body, mind and spirit?”
"A Sermon for Dangerous Times: How Do We Rest With Our Broken Hearts?"
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
Writing the Sacred Self
There must be spaces where authentic selves engaged in interdisciplinary discourse can come together to address inequality and work for social justice. Dr. Nigel Hatton made this point when he spoke of the critical importance of the Braxton Institute at our October 27, 2014 “Recovering Human Sustainability in a Time of War” symposium. Nigel’s observations remind me of Parker Palmer’s essay “Now I Become Myself” and the importance of naming all of the fragmenting things that get in the way of that wholeness and that becoming: