“What was surprising was that in talking about her with thoughtful people who are passionate about faith and social justice, I felt a new energy and enthusiasm for thinking about her life. I began to feel as if I was seeing her in a new, more meaningful way.”

“As an organizer for the CIO in the 1930s in the South, Mason visited a newspaper editor who was publicly and vociferously opposed to labor unions. She got a meeting with him in his office and noticed that he had a portrait of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee on his wall.  She began the meeting by sharing that Lee was a cousin of hers and it disarmed and charmed the editor. She left the meeting with his assurance that he would stop attacking the organizing efforts in his newspaper. She was able to find a connection that turned an ‘enemy’ into an ‘unusual ally.'”

“In the vitriol and uncertainty of the 2016 campaign and election, she has brought me comfort as someone who lived through equally chaotic times but who never wavered from her goal of creating humane working conditions and shared prosperity for all.”

“I think she would both remind us of our founding principles, especially the separation of church and state and the Bill of Rights (her ancestor George Mason was one of three founders who helped write the Constitution but who refused to sign it because it didn’t outlaw slavery or include the Bill of Rights), as well as caution us about remaining stagnate in our growth as a country, to ask anew every generation who we are leaving out of the promise of the American idea.”

“I think the thing that surprised me most was that she was a convert from the Baptist tradition! I do think there were a number of ‘radical’ Christian witnesses from the mid-part of the 20th century (Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, maybe Rose Hawthorne from the previous century) who were also converts, but I never expected a Sister working in Catholic health care to not have been raised Catholic. I was also surprised to learn that she was really the one who pioneered the now common practice of allowing fathers (and family members) to be in the delivery room with birthing mothers.”

“There’s a story she tells in her letters… she was doing a home visit in the Bayou and the family was without food. And she discovered that the mother was unable to receive a check that she had coming to her (some form of public assistance, I think) because the postmistress wouldn’t give it to her. This was apparently a common Jim Crow sort of practice. So she went down to the post office and in her older nun sort of way threatened the post mistress—and then that practice apparently came to an end. There are a series of stories of her confronting Jim Crow practices in her community. She had no fear!”

“One of the many great things about her story was that she kept opening herself up to new ministries and new opportunities for discipleship. She goes to the Bayou when she’s 57 and embarks on a completely different kind of work with the poorest of the poor. She’s had me thinking about what sort of chapters may lie ahead for me.”

“If we want to transform the world, the first step is to make sure we see every person as a person—which requires going to them, going to where they live, listening to their story, hearing from them what their needs are, and then working really hard to help them address those needs.  It really only is this sort of radical accompaniment (aka, solidarity) that can make a real difference. And, it’s how we concretely bring God’s grace to the world, person by person.”

“I think his prolificness… There was so much to read because he had documented his life’s work for justice thoroughly. I was surprised by some of his encounters, how he remained so consistent in his paradigm.”

“What I love best about Stringfellow is all the stories he told as illustrations of the universal issues of justice he was encountering. I love the story of how he moved into a tenement apartment and despite the roaches and filth, he was able to make a home for more than a year there. It reminds me of how fearless he was and how he lived the talk so gracefully.”

“I would take him to the Thistle Stop Cafe, where women who are survivors of trafficking, addiction, and prostitution run a beautiful restaurant and support the community of Thistle Farms. We would sip justice tea, eat whatever they served and I would ask him questions about grief, justice, and love.”

“I started dreaming of Stringfellow. In my dream I wiped tears from his eyes with the old lamb’s wool priests use to anoint those suffering. I have been affected by Stringfellow in my subconscious and been inspired to continue to the work I have been given all the days of my life.”

“The first thing I thought about was how much I listened to Jackson growing up. Many Sunday mornings, my father would play her album… When he listened to ‘In the Upper Room,’ he was always dressed in a dark suit with a dark skinny tie and he would stand over the record listening to it with his head bowed. As I studied Jackson’s singing style and learned what she tried to evoke for an audience when she performed, I realized my father used Jackson’s music to center himself in prayer before church. It’s something I had never thought of before.”

“As I began my writing about Jackson, I studied her performing style—I see her performances as the major primary source on Jackson as a figure of radical Christian witness—and noticed how she became another person on the stage in the course of a performance.  There was something happening, but I was not sure what it was. In shots of the audience, you can see people absorbed by the power of her performance, both from her voice and the emotion she communicates to her audience. Over the summer I went to the Chicago Historical Society to listen to a 1953 interview Jackson did with Studs Terkel, who many consider the father of modern oral history. In that interview, the first question Terkel asks is, ‘what goes on inside you when you sing?’ Jackson responded by saying ‘I truly have a divine feeling inside me. I don’t seem to be myself, I am transformed from Mahalia Jackson into something divine.’ Then it hit me: Jackson’s performances were transformative moments for her, the moments when she felt a connection with the divine and was at one with God.”

“Five years after her public announcement of support for civil rights in the Berkshires, the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy asked Jackson to perform in Montgomery, Alabama, at a symposium on the politics of social change. The event also honored those who had kept the bus boycott going. When Abernathy asked Jackson what her fee would be, her response was ‘I aint comin’ to Montgomery to make no money off them walkin’ folks!’ Jackson performed in Montgomery for free and for the benefit of the ‘walkin’ folks’ rather than charging them.”

“Writing about Jackson is reconnecting me with part of my past and my childhood and in a good way. I even find myself driving around listening to Jackson… When I listen to ‘Move on Up a Little Higher,’ I know I am doing what Jackson wanted, since she said, ‘I really feel it is wonderful for people of the world to stop and listen to a sacred record. The Lord commanded us to go in the highways and hedges and compel men to come to God.’ And I have listened to Jackson on the highways and hedges.”