Wisdom Lab: The Message

This 7-week Wisdom Lab invites us into a layered conversation between contemporary witness and ancient scripture. We’ll read The Message alongside the Bible in its full range of voices—lament and protest, memory and hope, prophetic critique and hard-earned wisdom.

The Message begins as a meditation on writing—but becomes something sharper: an autopsy of the stories that shape our lives and justify our suffering. Across three journeys—Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine—Ta-Nehisi Coates examines how language and narrative are used to manufacture belonging, sanctify power, and erase inconvenient truths. Myths of origin become tools. Neutrality becomes a shield for injustice. Journalism, he argues, is not a luxury—it is a lifeline for those living under the weight of someone else’s story.

In this 7-week Wisdom Lab, we’ll place Coates’ work alongside Scripture—not as a single moral voice, but as a sprawling library of testimony. We’ll listen to texts shaped by exile and empire, by people living under occupation, by prophets who refused “objective” language, and by communities trying to remember who they were before power rewrote the story. Rather than smoothing tensions, we’ll let them speak.

We’ll attend to:

how stories create reality

how myths protect hierarchy

how truth-telling costs those who do it

and how faith survives without heroes, certainty, or clean endings

This is not a debate space.

It’s a listening space—for raw truth, contested narratives, and the wisdom that emerges when we stop clinging to comforting stories.

Email nicole.richardson@tideandtable.org about how to join.

Come willing to listen. Come ready to be unsettled. Come expecting Scripture to surprise you.