In this last installment of my Listening with our Eyes and Breaking Our Hearts series I’d like to introduce you all to Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas. Since September of 2017, she has been the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary. Her book, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, came out in 2015 and is on my list of required reading. This week we hosted a Mom’s Demand Action meeting, and one of the speakers was Aviance Hill who is the chapter leader of Northwest Ohio Parents of Murdered Children, her son Isaac was murdered last summer by gun violence, and the person who shot him is shielded behind “Stand Your Ground.”“In her letter to Michael Brown’s parents, Trayvon’s mother said, ‘ We will bond (as parents of slain children), we will continue our fight for justice and make them remember our children in an appropriate light.’ We must all bond with these mothers by joining Rachel and refusing to be consoled until there is no longer a culture that perpetuates, as Trayvon’s mother says, ‘racial profiling and stereotypes [that] serve as the basis of illegitimate fear and the shooting and killing of young teenagers.’ We must refuse to be consoled until this world is safe for our black children. ‘God is in control,’ Sybrina Fulton said. And so God is. Left for each of us is to act like it, and thus t be where God is, standing up to stand-your-ground culture so that our sons and daughters might live. This book is my refusal to be consoled until the justice that is God’s is made real in the world” – Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, pg. 232