Grace Hunt

“The separation phase of leaving my previous environment broke my heart; but that breaking is necessary for an individual to be able to connect with what allows them to begin to rebuild.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

“One thing is absolutely definite: not everything that enters our ears penetrates our consciousness.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“The desire to read the Bible for themselves - the Bible the slaveholders had so long misrepresented to them- motivated a good many former slaves to seek education.
For Northern teachers, whether white or black, education had a moral purpose. In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, they believed schools ought to instill habits of thrift, honesty, punctuality, temperance, and discipline to the ex-slaves, who seemed to be lax about these moral virtues. The former slaves, however, insisted God was not going to punish them for every little sin. For them the essence of religion was not in observing rules and regulations, but in experiencing the power of God's grace within their hearts.”
― Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans

“For people who had been prohibited from learning to read and write as slaves, reading offered tangible proof that they were really free.”
― Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans