The shadow of the Holocaust, a genocide that happened in the middle of a supposedly civilized world, while that so-called civilized world refused to believe in the barbarism despite repeated reports and pleas, is never far for me as someone who grew up in Poland, even though I was born forty years after it happened and its memorialization was neatly limited to official places with plaques. These memories are everywhere, it just takes a bit of unearthing.

I invite us to open our eyes and the eyes of our hearts not only to humanity’s beauty, but how God gently nudges us every day to be Christ-like in our neighborhoods.

If the Incarnation teaches us anything, it teaches that God blesses and uses the body. Today, some churches incorporate dance and movement of the body into worship itself.

There is a healthy kind of nostalgia that can show us that our place is a room of remembrance, but we dare not allow unhealthy nostalgia to turn that room into an idolatrous space that will never grow, change, or adapt.

Recovering King’s legacy also means confronting our own complicity in systems of injustice. King’s critique of the “white moderate”— those more devoted to order than justice — remains painfully relevant.