Adult Education returns this Sunday on the theme "Suffering and Remembering"

Suffering and Remembering

Adult Education Theme for June 2022

Charles Lemert

This coming Sunday we will be at the eve of Memorial Day. Other modern nations may celebrate Victory Day as Russia did, ludicrously, earlier this month. France celebrates Bastille Day; Canada celebrates Canada Day. But none other, so far as I know, celebrates a Memorial Day as we do. But what are we remembering on Memorial Day? The Day began shortly after the Civil War in which some 865,000 soldiers were killed—more than in any war since. Not a community North or South was untouched by death. Drew Gilpin Faust, an historian of the Civil War, wrote The Republic of Suffering, a book that concludes: “We all live in the world of death the Civil War created.”

Suffering and Remembering are, obviously, central to Christian thought. I will take this as the theme for my sermon on May 29 but with special attention to the place of suffering and remembering in American culture. The Sunday after, June 5 at 9:30, Bob Sandine and I will begin a month-long Adult Education course covering Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown—and their roles is representing different versions of Christian thinking about slavery and the suffering it entailed.