Jeff Munroe

I’ve been ruminating lately on the rejections, absurdities, and moments of grace that could make someone a poet. What forces send a person into this difficult art, where anonymity is assured and financial reward all but nonexistent? How does the stuff of life become this particular craft?

What came clear to me as I worked on this book is that as much as throughout my career I have held up theology as essential, there is so much bad theology out there about why traumatic events happen and what God is supposedly accomplishing through these events that I believe we’ve reached a tipping point where we just need to keep our mouths shut and simply love people instead of offering explanations for the unexplainable.

Dr. King, the brightest light of the Civil Rights Movement, the descendant of enslaved people, is being appropriated by white conservatives for purposes which, if you peel back all the layers of rhetoric, are ultimately racist. On this day, of all days, it is time to repudiate this, in Ottawa County and beyond.