Now & Then Podcast | "Shoutin' in the Fire"
Danté Stewart
Original Release Date: October 15, 2022
In this pull-no-punches episode of Henri Nouwen, Now & Then, author Danté Stewart discusses Shoutin’ in the Fire, his stirring and unapologetic meditation on being Black in an anti-Black world.
Links & References:
Danté Stewart, "Shoutin' In The Fire" by Danté Stewart Amazon USA | Canada, The Source of Self-Regard by Tony Morrison, Imani Perry, Thomas Merton, Jesus & the Disinherited by Howard Thurman, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King, Jr., The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Jame Baldwin's Collected Essays, The Collected Poems of June Jordan, Enfleshing Freedom by M. Shawn Copeland, Katie Cannon, Paradise by Toni Morrison, Henri Nouwen's sermon series on "Being the Beloved", In the Name of Jesus by Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen, Follow Danté Stewart on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter
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Karen Pascal: Hello, I’m Karen Pascal. I’m the executive director of the Henri Nouwen Society. Welcome to a new episode of Henri Nouwen, Now and Then. Our goal at the Henri Nouwen Society is to extend the rich, spiritual legacy of Henri Nouwen to audiences around the world. Each week, we endeavor to bring you a new interview with someone who’s been deeply influenced by the writings of Henri Nouwen, and someone whose writing is an important and valued resource to spiritual seekers. We invite you to share the daily meditations and these podcasts with your friends and family. Our core purpose is to share Henri Nouwen’s spiritual vision, so that people can be transformed by experiencing themselves as God’s beloved.
Now, let me introduce you to my guest today. Today on this podcast, I have the pleasure of talking with Dante Stewart. Dante is the author of a new book called Shoutin’ in the Fire.
I love what author Robert Jones, Jr. says of Dante: “Only once in a lifetime do we come across a writer like Dante Stewart, so young and yet so masterful with the pen. This work, this Shoutin’ in the Fire, is a thing to make dungeons shake and hearts thunder. Each line is packed with such glowing wisdom and grounding love that it makes the eyes tear and the hair raise on the backs of necks. It has the lyrical prowess of a good sermon, yes, but the rhythm is entirely ancestral, like it was conveyed by our departed elders from their intimate prayer circles.”
Dante, it’s a wonderful book. It has been a treat to read. Thank you for joining us today on Henri Nouwen, Now and Then.
Dante Stewart: Oh, I looked forward to it.
Karen Pascal: Dante, it’s a stirring meditation on being Black, and learning to love in a loveless and a very anti-Black world. What compelled you to write it?
Dante Stewart: Well, I think every thing of art or artifact of art is always grown out of the deepest questions that one is facing in any given moment. So, when we talk about “what compelled you to write it?” my mind goes back to the moment where I am in my truck and just struggling. Alton Sterling is murdered and then Philando Castile is murdered.
And I am a young man who is trying to find himself. I’m married, I’m inside of a white church. I am so many things to so many different people. To some people I am the former athlete who was at Clemson and quit football, who left. For some people. I was the drummer, the little Drummer Boy, Vacuum Boy, Church Boy who shouted around church, who sang, who preached. For some people, I was just a worker at Enterprise – washing cars, renting out cars. For some people, I was a pastor intern, leading people through a book on race, about a white dude who says, “Oh, at one point in time I was racist, but then I got saved and then automatically, all of a sudden, everything went away.”
And for me, when I think about being compelled or in the language of the old days, being called to do something, having this kind of enthusiasm or being filled with God in any moment, I think about those times of me being many things to many people, and me choosing writing as a way to become something to myself. And that probably was what compelled me to write this book. I looked at my life, and so many people made me so many things and I let so many people make me so many things. And I was wondering: Is there a moment in time where I could choose something for myself, that is mine? That is the way I want it? That is the way I feel it? That is the way I remember it? And once it’s done, then it’s kind of soar in the world and do whatever it wants. So, that’s what kind of compelled me to write it.
Karen Pascal: It’s interesting, because as I read the book, I mean, I loved the honesty and I loved the story you were telling me, and it was your story. It was so personal. It was so intimate. And it’s funny, because I did a documentary series called Stories of Our Becoming, because I always found that when people started to tell, “how did I become who I am today,” they went back into who shaped and formed them.
And your story does that so well. It is the story of the little boy. It’s the story of all the influences. It’s the story of . . . it’s a self-awareness story that is told in a way that honestly, I want others to read, too, because you helped me understand things that I didn’t understand. I went on the journey with you through this book. And, you know, it’s funny. As I read it, I think I can hardly wait to read your next book, because you’re on a journey and you’re honest about it. That’s something I felt within the pages.
You have come of age in a time of terror. Let’s go back through that a little bit.
Dante Stewart: In the book, I chronicled, very viscerally and very intimately, death. When I think about my book, what’s crazy is, I never really thought that I was, or even thought of myself as a theologian of grief and self-love and becoming. But really, as I think about my work, so much of it is about giving language to very viscerally tough things, and trying, as Toni Morrison would say, to translate sorrow into meaning. And so, when I think about coming of age in a time of terror, it is about the ways in which my reality intersected with the realities of others who look just like me, but were treated by this world as if their humanity was a problem. And so, when I think about Alton Sterling and the times I watch – and I don’t know if this is healthy – the times that I replayed his death via audio and the moments leading up to it. Or Philando Castile, and playing that over and over and over again. Trying to become a journalist, a storyteller of not just the deaths they experienced, but the lives they lived.
It took me into places to think about how does one grieve and how does one get better? And how does one love and how does one grow up in a world where the relation to your personhood is either of dismissal, erasure, or destruction? And of course, as Imani Perry would say, Black life is not terrible; white supremacy is. And we have to be careful to say being Black in this country is not terrible. The conditions to which we have to live in and breathe in, as I work my way to the last chapter of exhale and humanity’s breath, those conditions are bad.
And so, coming of age in a time of terror, me chronicling the deaths of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, my uncle and others, and even George Floyd. It was about a young, Black man trying to make sense of the world in a way that I don’t lose hope, but I am seen, and my interior world is protected. And whoever chooses to go on that journey with me will see that I do cry. I do feel. I do mourn. But that’s not all I do. I live. I get better. I challenge myself. I grow. So, that is coming of age. It is about not letting the terror be the period of our lives, but the comma, and us being the writers, determining how that story is told in the end.
Karen Pascal: It’s interesting, because you speak truth to pain and to trauma and you don’t step aside in that. And you even. . . one of the things that really touched my heart was the honesty with which you addressed the transformation in yourself, in the process of rejecting Blackness and coming to love it. And that was really quite profound for me. Can you take us on that journey?
Dante Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. That journey begins, really, going to Clemson University and as a young man playing football from the Black rural South, oftentimes we hear that there’s nothing here for you. And we come to believe the script, the story that in order for us to be successful, in order for us to make it, in order for us to find some type of security in American society, then we need to be in close proximity to whiteness. And what we didn’t take into account is the ways in which, in order for whiteness to be a thing, then it must have total control. It must have control over the mind, the body, the movement, the imagination, the dreams, the future, the present, the past. It must have total, total dominance, you know, and I think it’s subtle, because in very real ways, in order for us to make it in the society, the ways in which these structures have been ordered, the world that we have inherited, is that it is true. That in order for you to be protected, in order for you to dream, in order for you to make it and find security, you have to be linked to whiteness in some form or fashion.
But for many of us, we don’t work off that framework. We go and we just think, I’m just an athlete playing at Clemson. I’m just a young man just trying to get it, how I live. I’m just trying to make something of myself. I’m just trying to do this and trying to become this and that. And over time, what we take for granted is there’s always a cost and there’s always a price to pay. And that’s why I entitled the chapter Wages. What it is, it is the metaphor of this is the wage of your entering. This is the price. This is what will happen to you if you are not aware of where you come from or where you’re going. Because if you don’t know who you are, then people will make you whatever they want. And I know that’s a familiar colloquialism, but it’s true.
But if you don’t know where you come from, if you don’t know the land that made you, that birthed you, that gave you vegetation, that gave you life, that gave you oxygen, then you will be convinced that all that land gives you is bad things. And all that land is useful for is providing for someone else and not you.
And so, that journey begins as a young, Black, rural kid going off to Clemson University, not knowing who I am, believing that the best thing I have to offer the world is my athletic ability rather than my humanity. And so over time, so many of us – and it’s not just me, it’s so many of us – those of us who come from the areas that I came from, which were marked by low income and things like that, lack of education, access to healthcare and everything is so far away and things like that, those places really stifle your identity and your dreams.
And so, when you get to places like Clemson University, it’s the thing that’s to be desired. And so over time, it was a subtle but powerful process that made me believe that my investment in white space was more important than the reality of my displacement from those Black, rural places and stories and traditions and voices that made me.
Karen Pascal: You expressed that so well. You ached for belonging. And then, it’s interesting, because you tell the story of how you turned to the white evangelical church and it was a place that you learned to be Christian, but never be Black. That’s what you write. And I found that profound. Tell me a bit about that.
Dante Stewart: Really, I started in California, so really, it actually started in Clemson. So, I was playing drums in the gospel choir in the off-season. And then, over time, when you’re an athlete at a predominantly white institution, then the people who have closest proximity to you are white Christians. And so, over time, you just start going to their environment, to their places. And so many of us received the message: You need to get spiritually connected and grounded, wherever you go. And there is something about Black spirituality that is flexible, in some sense of I am who I am. I stand in the world as who I am, but I am willing to receive from the faith tradition and voice of another. And so, when I went to Clemson and played there, I started going to FCA – Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Others go to Campus Outreach and Athletes in Action.
And what we didn’t realize is that these environments are not neutral. But they are very much rooted in tradition, particularly white, conservative, evangelical tradition. And they’re rooted in their understanding of what a Christian is, which is oftentimes a white, conservative, straight, Christian, male. And so, this imagination and this desired person is oftentimes at odds with your own lived experience. And this is even worse for Black women. This is even worse for Black LGBTQ or if you’re non-Black and LGBTQ or if you’re trans. Anybody who does not perfectly align with that white, male, Christian, conservative identity is oftentimes treated as second class. Their creativity and value are exploited or erased. And ultimately, they have to live inside of a religious environment where the first response to their humanity is not embrace, but the first response to their humanity is damnation.
And so, going into these environments in college, you get caught up in it. It’s like a whirlwind where you get sucked into the ocean and wherever it spits you out, that’s where you land. And ultimately, we landed in Calvary Chapel and then ultimately, through time, to the Southern Baptist Church, until 2016, 2017, where I ultimately realized that my family and I could not be in a space that only one of my presence insofar made them believe that they were not racist, but didn’t really love us for who we are. They were terrific, you know, at listening to Black stories and in some sense, exploiting Black stories, but ultimately these spaces proved inept and terrible at loving Black people. And so, the more I was inside of that space, the more I realized that truth.
Karen Pascal: You write: “I’d spent years in white churches showing I was the nice, Black dude.” And then, there’s a quote here that I like: “We’re not here because our country and the people of this country have been exceptional at becoming more loving and more honest and less violent. No. We’re here because we refuse to believe their lie that our lives don’t matter, that we should accept our suffering, and the best parts of ourselves are what can survive whiteness and terror.”
You don’t spare yourself at all in this book, and I appreciate it so much, because it is really a story of becoming; it is really a story of waking up. I love also, you wrote another thing in here – you know something, if you looked at my book, it is just [under]lined throughout because I enjoyed it so much – but one of the things that caught my eye was this quote here: “I don’t know if I’ll have the answers, but what I do know is Black people deserve love. Black people don’t deserve bullets. Black people deserve tenderness. Black people don’t deserve terror.”
Tell me who Jesus is for you in all of this. I want to know, because I think that, too, has gone through a deeper understanding that you need to share with us. It’s rich and it’s real.
Dante Stewart: For me, at one point in time, Jesus was just a theological concept. Jesus was this kind of ethereal, out-there person who became like almost the joker card, the one that wins the game in the end. The one that has all power, that is desired not simply because it is, but because it’s something about it that can be used to overtake another, to overpower another, to be seen as objective and, in some sense, powerful in the world. And this goes back to my own reading of Howard Thurman, in Jesus and the Disinherited. There were books that were formative for me when I was going through my own spiritual unraveling and being put back together again. And one of those books was Jesus and the Disinherited, by Howard Thurman.
Another was Where Do We Go from Here, by Martin Luther King. Another was The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin. Another was Enfleshing Freedom, by Shawn Copeland, theologian Shawn Copeland. And we’re here for a podcast celebrating Henri Nouwen, and it is no way to think about my journey with Jesus or my journey with myself without thinking about Reaching Out, or In the Name of Jesus, or even The Wounded Healer or Life of the Beloved, or even that famous Henri Nouwen sermon on being the beloved of God. And I think about all of those voices and those imaginations or theological imaginations of who Jesus is. And, at one point in time, I read Jesus as this being that was to be used for power and control and a way to arrogantly position myself as believing that in order for people to be close to God, they had to be close to me.
But now over time, through both writing, through reading, through my own journey, I’m realizing I would rather a Jesus of John 10:10 that says that “the enemy comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that they may have life and experience life to the full.” When I think about Jesus and I read Jesus through my own experience, because if we are honest, and this is kind of back on my sociology background, thinking about C. Wright Mills, that we all have experienced the world from the place of our own lived experience, our experience of religion, our experience of God, the way we name God, the way we relate to God and ourselves and to the natural world and to the world of humanity, has always grown out of the social, political, religious context we are groomed and grown in. And so that is going to shape how we name God and think about God and the like, and what we do with God when we actually “have” God.
And so, when you look in Christian history, there’s always been this battle for what type of God would consume our imagination, to what type of faith would consume my body. And so, I think about these writers, from Baldwin, to Morrison, to Bambara, to Henri Nouwen, to Thomas Merton and the like, I’ve started to understand Jesus as a friend and a lover and a liberator, not just somebody who wants to control and demean and demand everything of another, that takes everything from their personhood. But I feel God that comes close and comes near, that does not want to erase us and does not want us to hate ourselves in order to be loved by God.
And as I write in the book, Jesus does not have to hurt people in order to love them. And so, I think about my understanding of Jesus, whether it’s my own understanding of politics or religion, or my own understanding of myself and relating to myself, if it steals from me my ideal of what I can become – based on the dignity that God had already placed upon me, that emanates from the very center of my life – if it steals that from me, if it kills my imagination of what I in the world can become, and if it destroys the beauty and the fabric of our lives, that’s woven together in our stories, then it’s not something that Jesus wants. The Jesus that I have come to learn and to love is the Jesus that wants us to experience life and life to the full.
And there’s a story in the gospels, with Jesus talking to the Pharisees, and many of the leaders, the religious leaders, used religion as a way to harm others. And Jesus says to them, “You have heard it said, but I say to you,” and I imagine that Jesus in my own, sanctified imagination, thinking with Professor Wil Gafney and her book, Womanist Midrash, a womanist theological reflection, and in my sanctified imagination, I imagine Jesus saying that your faith is public, but it is problematic. And if we want to live the life of Jesus, then we need a faith that liberates and loves and puts us back together again, allows us to find ourself, rather than a faith that turns faith into a weapon to be used.
Karen Pascal: Oh, wow. Tell me a little bit about Jesus’ solidarity with Blackness, because you get that, and you’ve just shared that, in some ways. And yet, there’s also more that I found within your book that just moved my heart so much. The solidarity with Black bodies being lynched and Jesus being lynched. I get that. And I loved it. And I want you to share a little bit about that.
Dante Stewart: This now, this is really in Dr. James H. Cone, and in his incredible books: Black Theology and Black Power; God of the Oppressed; Spirituals and the Blues; The Cross and the Lynching Tree. When I started to read, and this really was my reading of his last book, which was his theological memoir, his spiritual autobiography, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody. He had this line that kind of steeled me when I read it. He said that he had this PhD, but he needed to develop a theology that was both accountable to God and to Black people. And when I think about Jesus’ Blackness, I don’t think about it, to use this kind of theological term or scientific term or philosophical term, ontological.
I don’t care. I mean, I do care that Jesus is not white, but I’m not as caring of what was Jesus, particularly, ontologically Black, but I am more concerned about the ways in which Jesus stood alongside in solidarity with the marginalized of society, the same way Black people deal with marginalization in our society, and is somebody who stands in that marginalization and wants to bring meaning, to say that your life matters much more than the political or the spiritual and religious space wants to tell you. I am concerned with the type of love that Toni Morrison writes about in Paradise, when she writes that that Jesus had been freed from white religion, and he wanted these kids to know that they did not have to beg for respect; it was already in them, and they only needed to display it.
They weren’t talking about Jesus’ skin color, particularly, though he definitely wasn’t white, but they were talking about his experience – about how Jesus knew, like James Baldwin, what it meant to live in an occupied territory, and how James Baldwin and Katie Cannon and so many of these Black theologians and womanist theologians wanted to say that the Jesus that we worship is not a Jesus who’s just simply concerned about this nostalgic past, but like Henri Nouwen asks, “How do we lead this person to tomorrow?”
And that’s the Jesus that is Black, the Jesus that believes that there are Black people in the future and is foundationally and fundamentally concerned with, how do I lead the Black child, the Black woman, the Black gay, the Black trans folk, the Black writer, the Black preacher, the Black husband, the Black father, the Black man, the Black woman, the Black person who’s insecure, the Black person who is secure, the one who is an artist, the one who’s on the street. How do I lead that person to tomorrow? That is the Jesus that’s Black for me.
Karen Pascal: I love that. I love that. It’s interesting, because you do remind me of Henri Nouwen. You remind me of him so much, because of that level of honesty that I find in all of his writings. And you mentioned The Wounded Healer. Do you have that feeling of being called yourself? In a way, you can’t be a wounded healer until you honestly say, “Here are the wounds. Here they are. Here’s what I’m carrying. Here’s what I’m trying to hide.” But then to actually use them to minister to others is so profound. Tell me a little bit about some of the ways in which you find Henri has given you resources.
Dante Stewart: Oh, man. Oh, well, I have at present, as we’re talking, I have a copy of The Wounded Healer in front of me. In preparation for this conversation, I went back and pulled out my copies of Henri Nouwen, and actually, Reaching Out. I read Reaching Out every year; every single year, I read Reaching Out. But I don’t know where . . . actually, I don’t know where it’s at currently. My children have been in my study; I’ve got books all over the place. And I don’t know where, I really don’t even know where my copy of Reaching Out is at. But when I think about Henri Nouwen’s importance in my life, I’m on page 38, and it’s lined, it’s lined again and again and again, and underline I write: The Christian leader is therefore a person who is willing to put their own articulated faith at the disposal of those who ask for their help.
Then I go on page 39, and it’s three paragraphs I underline. And I write “vulnerability” with an exclamation point. Then I go, and there’s a folded page on page 41, and there’s underlining, and I got three exclamation points, and then I can go to the end of the book on page 81. And I wrote, “the community of liberators. The world is full of women and men and children who are waiting, waiting for liberator Jesus.” And I probably wrote this back in 2016, 2017, when I was trying to be put back together in my own unraveling, in my own revelation of myself. And I realized that Henri Nouwen was a person who gave me language. He was a person who taught me how to be compassionate with myself. He was a person who taught me that our religion can only be powerful insofar as it helps the most marginalized find their humanity and meaning and their freedom. Henri Nouwen was a person who showed me that there are things, like I write on page 84, inside of myself that I write, reflect on this. Then there are times where I write, “wow!” And I’m wowed by this person.
And so, when I think about him, that is what Henri Nouwen is for me. It’s like, he’s given me language, he’s giving me things to ponder. He’s given me the grace and the compassion that we all need. And I think of my book as that for people. You will be disappointed if you come to my book looking for answers, but you will find so much if you come to my book looking for yourself.
Karen Pascal: That is so well put. It’s interesting, because I underlined the word “vulnerability,” because your book is vulnerable. You allowed yourself to be vulnerable. I didn’t feel like you hid. I felt like you said, “Here’s my journey.” You helped me understand how rage became a tool in your life. Rage literally became a tool to put the shattered self back together again, which was important. But I love the vulnerability and I want to encourage everyone to get this book. I loved it and I think it’s an important book to be reading right now. I really do.
It’s funny, because before we talked, you had mentioned how you’d enjoyed Reaching Out. So, I found my copy of Reaching Out, and what I was reminded of with Reaching Out, I commissioned my son-in-law as a painter to do a painting of Henri. This is back about seven or eight years ago. And he did a beautiful painting of Henri. He’s a gifted painter, but he took the background and he put the pages of Reaching Out – that became the canvas, because he said, “That has so spoken into my life, that he speaks to me out of those words.” And there’s Henri sitting on the pages of Reaching Out, because I guess it’s Henri being vulnerable in his books that has really perhaps met us in ways that . . . Maybe we’re used to it now, but we weren’t at the time, when he started writing like this. I don’t think there were many that were writing like this, but he was willing to say, “Here’s my inner battle,” and be so breathtakingly honest with it that you could drop your mask and say, “I’ve got a battle, too. I’m warring in this area of my life. I’m trying to keep the mask up, but it’s falling down all the time.”
It is the breathtaking honesty of your book and the fearlessness that I have really loved. Toward the end, there’s a question that you drop in there that your sister asked, and it was a sweet question. And I meant to start with it, but here we are getting closer to the end. And it was the question about when did you first realize you were Black? She asked that.
Dante Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. I answered that one way in the book. And I think now, I’m always going to be returning back to that question. Even today, when I think about the question, I think about it now, years removed from that question, I’m like, okay, I think I first learned it back home. Before I ever knew what white supremacy or racism was, I knew the warmth of our home. Before I ever knew the history that was woven into the fingers of my mother and my father, my grandmother, and my grandfather, I knew what it meant for them to create a space where we saw ourselves in art and music and film. Before I ever knew that certain people were hell-bent on erasing our stories, my home was surrounded by books telling us who we are and where we come from, where we can go. Before I ever knew that policing in this country was an institution just built out of this unmitigated desire to see Black people as criminals, in my own home I knew that I was not a criminal, but I was somebody to be loved and desired.
And so, when was the first time I knew I was Black? It was back home. And I guess, as I’m answering that question today, it is every single day, I’m learning more and more what it means to be who I am, and to become who I am in the midst of all the insecurity. To try and collect artifacts of our lives and the everyday, ordinary power of who we are, whether through a copy of Jet magazine from 1963 that sits behind me, or a copy of the 1961 issue of Ebony magazine that sits behind me, or whether it’s the Black newspaper that circulated around the country that sits behind me, from 1963, when JFK was murdered, or whether it’s all the Black books and classics that surround me, or the records that are literally on my shelf, or even the picture of my family that’s on the shelf as well. I’m learning what that means every day – every, every, every single day, I’m learning what that means. And it’s making me better.
And I’m reminded of James Baldwin, writing in In Search of a Majority, where he says that he perceives his own life as journeying toward that which he doesn’t understand. And it is in the journeying that he becomes better. And so, I believe that answering that question, “when was the first time you learned that you were Black,” is a question that I’m answering myself, or reaching toward, every single day. And in that journeying toward what others did not want us to see, what others wanted to destroy, what I have come to find the miracle that is our Blackness. It is in journey toward that, that I’m becoming better.
Karen Pascal: Well, it’s throughout the pages of this book. I know you’re a cherished child. I know you’re a cherished husband and friend. I can see that in the pages, and now a father of two, which is pretty exciting. The sense of being cherished is important, and knowing God cherishes us. And as I look at what you have written, I want to ask one last question: What’s your hope where you sit today? Tell me.
Dante Stewart: It’s on the last line of the book: “We are exhausted, but we catch our breath again.” There have been people who’ve read my book and have criticized it, because it’s not hopeful enough. I’ve literally had people say that: “Where is the hope in this book? Where is it?” As much like when people read Ta-Nehesi Coates, Between the World and Me, and they’re like, “Yo, there’s no hope in the book.” And at one point in time, I believed that, too, about Between the World and Me, until I read it again and again and again. And I found that the hope that we desire is in the living. It is, despite all of the things that try to choke our common humanity out, you can be non-Black and read this book and identify with ways that things have choked your humanity out, or tried to steal your joy or tried to steal your idea of yourself. But this book is also about the ways in which, even in the midst of the chokeholds of life, that we find ways to breathe, have grace and compassion in ourselves and be transformed in our stories and become the type of people that we desire to see in the world. And so, that’s my hope, and it’s woven through all of the book: To love yourself, to respect yourself. As June Jordan says, that “I am feminist and I am Black. And that means this: that I decide to love myself and respect myself as if everything is dependent on my ability to have self-love and self-respect.” That is that book. That is Shoutin’ in the Fire. It’s learning how, in the midst of the fires of life, to go through them, but to go through the fire not as something that destroys us, but as something that refines us. Yes, it’s hot.
Karen Pascal: It’s hot, is right. Shoutin’ in the Fire. This book is hot, but I have got to say you’re right: It’s for everyone, because it really tells you how to take what comes your way and find the way through it and onward and upward. And it really models that, that I would say. But I’ll tell you one of the clear (to me) ingredients in it is the pure honesty. You don’t go easy on yourself or anyone else. And I love that. And I think it makes it such an important book for everyone to be reading.
Honestly, please, readers or listeners, do consider Dante Stewart’s Shoutin’ in the Fire. I highly recommend it.
Dante, thank you so much. Thank you so much for what you have given us today. It’s profound and it calls us forward and it awakens a sense of worth and value in everyone, I hope. It’s been good stuff. Thank you.
Dante Stewart: Thank you. Thank you so much for this conversation.
Karen Pascal: Thank you for listening to today’s podcast. I thoroughly enjoyed Dante Stewart’s book, Shoutin’ in the Fire, and I highly recommend you get this. As well, we talked about Henri’s books, The Wounded Healer and Reaching Out – they’re both classics. If our discussion today has challenged and inspired you, please pass this podcast on to others.
For more resources related to today’s conversation, click on the links on the podcast page of our website. You’ll find links to anything mentioned today, as well as book suggestions. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would be so grateful if you take time to give us a review or thumbs-up or pass this on to your friends and companions on the faith journey.
Thanks for listening. Until next time.
