Put Out into the Deep

Feb 20 2025

Hello, and welcome to the Put Out into the Deep, the newsletter of Building Catholic Futures. In this issue, we invite you to the first in a series of Meet the Witnesses webinars and give a sneak peek into the subject of our next worksheet.

The Storyteller

Nate Tinner-Williams is the co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger, which offers news and commentary relevant to African-American Catholics. He was one of the presenters at all of BCF’s events during our St. Louis Mission Week, and he’s helped us develop our Journeys curriculum. Nate spends his days telling other people’s stories; if you’re interested in his journey, including his upbringing in the Black Church tradition and his reception into the Catholic Church, his experiences in St. Louis, and how his work with Black Catholic Messenger resonates with BCF’s vision,

we invite you to join us for a recorded interview with Eve on Wednesday, March 5, at 7pm Eastern/4pm Pacific time.

This is the first in a series of webinars where you can meet our current roster of Witnesses. We’ve learned that nothing “starts the conversation” better than an encounter with a real person. Our Witnesses are starting new conversations, grounded in confidence that God calls gay people to missionary discipleship.

The Vagabond

We are working on the fourth entry in our series of biographical worksheets: the Harlem Renaissance poet and memoirist Claude McKay. We discovered Brenna Moore's excellent Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism. Moore shows that spiritual friendship, including friendship with the saints, animated Catholic intellectual life in the 20^th century, especially among those bound together by resistance to totalitarianism and racism.

Here are two glimpses of her work on the spiritual meaning of McKay's friendships:

Like all the protagonists in this book, Claude McKay spurned modernity's traditional anchors: the nation and the nuclear family. A self-described wanderer and "vagabond," McKay felt that friends were the threads that held his world together. McKay dedicated his books to friends, wrote essays on the complexities and difficulties of friendships with white people, and rhapsodized on the almost mystical pleasures of Black male friendship in his 1929 novel Banjo. McKay's friends, male and female, white and Black, were his lifeline. They floated him money between writing jobs, nursed him through illness, and introduced him to religion. But he also withdrew from them, canceling and dodging commitments, and by the end of his life, he had become paranoid and needy. Friendships were difficult for McKay, but he never stopped his efforts, and he converted to Catholicism because of the connections he had made at an experimental, interracial community in Harlem, the Friendship House.

[...]

To prepare [Friendship House workers to face racist violence], and to keep calm in the face of agitators, the volunteers were taught to "use spiritual weapons." The theology of the mystical body of Christ was the weapon of choice for these Catholics, in which people of all races were understood to be connected as members of Christ's body. ...They prayed it, incorporated it into liturgies, talked about it, and tried to internalize it as a counter-narrative to American racial violence and as a source of spiritual sustenance. In a short essay about his baptism, McKay, too, evokes this theology: "I do believe in the mystery of the symbol of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, through which all of humanity may be united in brotherhood."

Claud McCay, courtesy picryl.

Eve and Keith