it happened again.

Speaker 2: Everyone around our city, around the country, around the world, pray with us for those who are currently at UofL Hospital, injured, fighting for their lives as a result of another act of gun violence.

Melissa Harris-Perry: According to the gun violence archive, the US has already endured more than 140 mass shootings this year. That's more than the number of days we've had in 2023. The violence has claimed hundreds of lives and left a wake of loss, grief, and despair. The killings in Louisville came exactly two weeks after a 28-year-old shooter entered a small private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, fired 152 rounds, and took the lives of three adults and three precious nine-year-old children.

The day after that shooting, Reverend Barry Black, chaplain of the US Senate, offered a prayer that stunned many.

Reverend Barry Black: When babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers. Remind our lawmakers of the words of the British statesman Edmond Burke, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing."

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is a frustration so many of us can understand. At the same time, most of us, we don't have the power of legislative office or executive authority. How are we to respond to these devastating moments? Do thoughts and prayers have any value? What does it mean in a secular democracy to openly and actively appeal to God?

Yolanda Pierce: My name is Yolanda Pierce. I am currently professor and Dean at the Howard University School of Divinity. Beginning July 1st, I will be the incoming Dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I asked Dean Pierce, who is my longtime friend and colleague, to talk with me about what it means to meet the many challenges of our national moment, informed by a faith tradition rooted in Black womanist theology.

Yolanda Pierce: There are families that are mourning, communities that are grieving, and we don't do enough around what it means to lose someone. What does it mean when nine-year-old children are not safe in the place that, as parents, we send them every day? The reason, in part, why thoughts and prayers are not enough, is because it doesn't take seriously the deep anguish, grief, trauma, and sense of breathiness that families and communities experience because of gun violence.

We want to quickly move to, "Well, that happened yesterday," as if there's still not blood crying from the ground.

Melissa Harris-Perry: On the one hand, thoughts and prayers are not enough, and yet, sometimes, it feels like all there is, when we're faced either interpersonally or politically, nationally, even globally, with these enormous challenges. Is there any room for holding one another in a prayerful or compassionate attention?

Yolanda Pierce: Absolutely, there's room. I think we are critiquing when thoughts and prayers are the beginning, the middle, and the end, and those thoughts and prayers are not followed by action, by something changing, by something being transformed. It is absolutely necessary for us to hold one another, grieve with one another, pray with one another, but when it stops there and all we're really doing is bracing ourself for the next shooting, that's the problem.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, I'm a seminary-trained academic who, over the past 20 years, has sometimes enjoyed the privilege of a significant public platform, like this show. Dean Pierce has been my friend throughout those years. I've often asked her if she believes we do more harm than good by invoking discussions of faith in our attempts to understand, analyze, and sometimes simply survive the politics of our moment, whether in the context of mass shootings or in an attack on reproductive rights.

Yolanda Pierce: We have very different approaches to our theology, certainly different approaches to how we think about reproductive rights, but as a woman, as theologian, I stand firmly on the side of the free will that God has given me to make choices, and I get to make those choices for myself with my God, with my medical team. How we talk about that shouldn't be yielded simply to a conservative or religious right voice. I love faith discourse in public.

What I fear is living in a theocracy, where that faith discourse becomes law. I think people have every right, I think it's actually important, in a democracy, for people to be able to talk about their faith or lack of faith, for people to be able to be agnostic, atheist, humanist, or people to be devout in whatever their particular belief. I love a democracy where all religions get to speak about who they are, and what they believe.

My one moment of encouragement is thinking about Vanderbilt Divinity School, understanding of itself, and its motto is that it's the School of Prophets. That was its name, at its founding. All I can say is that we need more prophetic voices everywhere, and none of us can abdicate our responsibility, even in places like Tennessee, Florida, or Mississippi, to be a prophetic voice.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let me ask then, when you say prophetic voice, what do you mean by that?

Yolanda Pierce: The prophetic is not about predictions for the future. We have no oracle, no crystal ball to tell us what's happening, but the best of the Black prophetic voice is, in fact, a warning about what we need to do in order to live and be neighbors with one another. The Black prophetic voice is a voice of critique. It is a voice of speaking truth to power. It is not necessarily a popular voice.

It may, in fact, get you kicked out of the legislator, if you dare to say that my stance to protest gun violence, which killed children, is more important than the decorum of the floor of this legislative body, but this Black prophetic voice of speaking truth to power, of telling the truth even when it hurts, and even when it is at your own personal risk, is a part of our history and our tradition.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dean Pierce, tell me about the prophetic legacy of Howard Thurman.

Yolanda Pierce: Howard Thurman was an amazing figure, a teacher of King, a mystic theologian. He is deeply connected to some of our HBCUs, including Howard. He is really the father of the interfaith movement. What I love about Howard Thurman is his description of his grandmother, who had been born into slavery, never learned to read or write, but loved hearing the text, the biblical text, read to her. Howard Thurman, as a kid, would sit at his grandmother's feet and read biblical passages.

At one point, she says to the young Howard Thurman, "Don't read me those passages," these were passages by Paul, these were passages that, basically, said to enslaved people, "Be content with your status as slaves," and she said, "Don't read them to me." Other versions say she says, "Tear those out of my Bible." I love the audacity of this Black woman, born into slavery, now experiencing freedom, saying there are words, there are texts, there are even beloved texts, that harm, that do us a great deal of harm.

I don't have to read them, I don't have to listen to them, I don't have to abide by them in order to have a relationship with God. Howard Thurman's grandmother becomes a model for doing womanist theology. First, do no harm.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Quick break here. We're back with more on the value of faith discourse in public life right after this. We're back, and I'm still with Professor Yolanda Pierce, outgoing Dean of the School of Divinity at Howard University, and incoming Divinity School Dean at Vanderbilt. One of the things that I always find most powerful in our conversations is that you also turn the prophetic eye onto yourself. You ask about when you're getting it wrong, you update in real-time. You're pretty vulnerable about learning, and working in doing better.

Yolanda Pierce: I think what you're describing here, Melissa, that's so critical is, for me, the only word I can say is that it's the operation of grace. I grew up in a very legalistic, very narrow religious environment. Loving, but very legalistic. There was no room to have conversations about trans people, almost as if it did not even exist. There was no room to really talk about LGBT issues in the church. All of this was just absolute silence. I had to grow. I had to learn. I had to figure out that there is room for all of us under God's umbrella.

How that learning and growth happened, it was, for me, in the classroom. As an educator, I am learning more from my students than they're probably learning from me. For these past X number of years, we won't name the number of years, I have been walking with amazing students, from every walk of life, who are teaching me, who are helping me when I get the pronouns wrong, who are helping me to understand things I never knew, so that I can continue to learn and grow. I say grace, because there has to be grace.

We can't be stagnant in our faith. We can't imagine that there's not room for everyone at the table. We can't imagine, as educators, that we're not also learning and growing with our students. They teach us so much.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What will you take, as you leave Howard University for Vanderbilt?

Yolanda Pierce: I will take so much with me from this, my first experience at an HBCU, the six years that I spent at Howard, immersing myself in historically Black colleges and universities, students from every walk of life. It is very scary to leave a place that feels very comfortable. I dare to suggest that we are often called into uncomfortable places, things that really prick us, things that are going to change us and shape us in indescribable ways, and to simply have assurance that, in those uncomfortable places, you are not alone.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dean Yolanda Pierce, my friend, my sister, my teacher, thank you so much for joining us on The Takeaway today.

Yolanda Pierce: Thank you so much for having me.

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