for android download Disciples: Liberation

And yet there’s hope in the end,” she says. “And I see people being victims of a system that can’t see their full humanity and assumes the worst of them. I see Jesus surrounded by Black and brown people who wish they could do something, but had no power in the moment,” says Cleveland, author of “God Is a Black Woman.”

“When I see the Easter story, I see Jesus being a victim of state-sanctioned violence.

Now she realized that he looked more like her, a Black woman.įor Cleveland, changing the colour of Jesus changed how she viewed the meaning of Easter.

Cleveland, who would go on to become a theologian and social psychologist, realized she had always pictured a Nordic-looking Jesus who looked like Thor. Jesus was depicted as a man of colour - somewhere between brown and Black - and so were his disciples.

Follow the CTV News channel on WhatsAppīut it was another colour in the picture that caught her eye.

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The painting looked like an ancient relic discovered in some long-forgotten desert monastery in the Holy Land, a Byzantine-styled fresco filled with sharply contoured figures, bursting with colours of deep blue and blood orange. It was a painting of a resurrected Jesus surrounded by his awe-struck disciples, including “Doubting Thomas” touching the wound in Christ’s torso. But one day she came across a portrayal of Christ that was so astonishing that she gasped. Christena Cleveland spent much of her childhood in an evangelical church surrounded by traditional images of a porcelain-skinned and flaxen-haired Jesus.

For android download Disciples: Liberation