This Sunday, I found myself unexpectedly in the magnificent Marsh Chapel at Boston University during the 75th anniversary celebration of this spiritual institution. I had simply come to visit my daughter. Still, providence placed me in the sanctuary just as the guest preacher—the Reverend Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia—delivered a powerful sermon that spoke directly to our fraught contemporary moment, reminding me why the vocabulary of faith sometimes reaches truths that political language cannot touch.
Senator Warnock opened with the prophetic vision from Isaiah 40, that sublime passage about valleys being exalted and mountains made low, crooked places made straight, and rough places smooth. These ancient words, he reminded us, constitute nothing less than God’s moral topography—a sacred blueprint for how the world ought to be ordered when divine justice prevails. As the senior pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church—Martin Luther King Jr.’s spiritual home—and as Georgia’s first Black U.S. Senator, he brings unique authority to this message. He embodies the very transformation Isaiah prophesied, living proof that rough places can be made smooth, that the impossible can become actual.
Senator Warnock was unsparing in his analysis. He spoke of equity, that word which has become almost illegal to utter in certain quarters, yet which appears unambiguously in scripture as God’s intention for creation. “When you are accustomed to privilege,” he declared, “parity and equity might sound like oppression.” He drew on his own family history to illuminate this point, speaking of his father who was a pastor of a small church but supported the family as a junk man, loading old cars onto trucks he constructed himself without an engineering degree. His father would pick up broken, discarded vehicles that others had thrown away. “But on Sunday morning,” Warnock testified, “the junk man became the preacher man, and he took off his work clothes and put on his church clothes, and the man who spent Monday through Friday lifting up old, broken, thrown away cars, stood behind the sacred desk on Sunday morning and lifted up broken people that other people had thrown away.” Our God, he proclaimed, is a junk man who sees the treasure in other people’s trash.
This struck me profoundly. We live in a historical moment of staggering wealth inequality, where recent legislation has engineered what Senator Warnock called “the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history.” This is not political rhetoric but economic fact—socialism for the rich, Robin Hood in reverse. He then turned to a concrete example that had just unfolded in our politics: the spectacle of bringing 44 million Americans who depend on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) into the crossfire of budget negotiations, even as millions had lost healthcare coverage or seen premiums double.
Here is where Senator Warnock’s sermon became uncomfortable for comfortable people: “How do you take the most vulnerable people in the country and make them pawns?” he asked. The answer lies in our collective failure of moral imagination. We have, as Christians, particularly maligned the poor so thoroughly that we now blame them for their poverty rather than being offended by poverty itself. Senator Warnock offered a devastating corrective: about a third of SNAP recipients work. They have jobs. They go to work every day and still cannot feed their families adequately. “You want to know who you’re subsidizing?” he thundered. “You’re subsidizing some of the wealthiest corporations in the United States of America, who will not pay their people a living wage. That’s the fraud, that’s the abuse.”
This is equity. This is what it means for mountains to be made low and valleys exalted—not some abstract ideal but the concrete demand that those who work should be able to eat, that children should not go hungry in the world’s wealthiest nation, that the powerful must yield some ground so that we might find, in Howard Thurman’s phrase, “common ground.”
But Senator Warnock was not finished with his indictment. Valleys exalted and mountains made low—that’s equity. But crooked places made straight? That’s integrity. He named the crooked places: gerrymandering that allows politicians to pick their voters rather than voters picking their representatives; a criminal justice system where, as Bryan Stevenson observes, you’re better off being rich and guilty than poor and innocent; the outsized influence of pharmaceutical money that prevents even modest reforms like universal background checks for firearms despite overwhelming public support across the political spectrum. Speaking of his legislative victories, Senator Warnock expressed pride in capping insulin costs at $35 per month for seniors. However, he acknowledged his frustration at being unable to extend this to everyone due to “the outsized influence of moneyed interests in our politics.” Crooked places. “The best politicians that money can buy,” he said, and the congregation knew he was not being partisan but prophetic.
The crooked places are everywhere—in housing policy, educational access, and environmental justice. They are the accumulated weight of systems designed to advantage some at the expense of others, and calling them out is not divisive but diagnostic. You cannot heal what you will not name.
Yet the sermon was not an exercise in despair. After laying out the challenges—the need for equity, the demand for integrity—Senator Warnock turned to the possibility. God, he insisted, knows how to make rough places smooth. His personal testimony was powerful and specific. He spoke of a Georgia where, when he was born, he was represented by two United States senators who were arch-segregationists. One of them said explicitly that Black people had their place—at the back door. Today, Senator Warnock occupies that man’s Senate seat. In fact, he mentioned that when he was offered a larger office in a different building, he chose to remain in the building named after that Georgia segregationist. “Every now and then when I’m on my way to my office, I get to pass by his statue, and every now and then I look back over my shoulders and say, ‘How you like me now?'” Rough places made smooth.
This is not triumphalism but testimony. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend toward justice—not automatically, but through the sustained pressure of those who refuse to accept crooked places as permanent features of the landscape.
Senator Warnock then arrived at the beating heart of Isaiah’s vision: “All flesh shall see it together.” This is the radical inclusivity at the core of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the insistence that divine love extends to all of creation. He quoted Toni Morrison’s beautiful words from Beloved: “Over here we are flesh. Yonder, they don’t love your flesh. We’re flesh that laughs and weeps and dances barefoot on the grass. Love your flesh.”
All flesh. Not some flesh. Not the deserving flesh or the properly credentialed flesh or the flesh that shares our theology or politics or ethnicity. All flesh. This is why diversity is not a human resources initiative but a theological commitment. This is why inclusion is not political correctness but a gospel mandate. This is why equity is not a liberal plot but divine intention. Senator Warnock’s mother, he told us, grew up in Waycross, Georgia, picking tobacco and cotton in the 1950s—picking somebody else’s crops. Her aged hands, which once picked crops for others, helped her youngest son become a United States senator. “All flesh shall see it together,” he proclaimed, and in that octogenarian’s hands, wrinkled by labor and blessed by longevity, we see the validation of Isaiah’s vision.
Senator Warnock concluded with a beautiful metaphor. He spoke of watching geese fly in their characteristic V formation. The goose out front, who appears to be getting all the glory and attention, is actually working the hardest, breaking the wind resistance for all the others. But geese understand something humans seem to have forgotten: when the lead goose grows tired, it simply moves back into the formation, and another takes its place. “Geese do that without engaging in geese gerrymandering,” he observed to laughter. “They do it without civil war. They do it without church schism. Geese do that without shutting the whole goose government down, because geese understand that my individual location is not as important as our collective destination.”
There it is—the spiritual dimension of diversity, equity, and inclusion distilled into an image from nature. We are not in competition for scarce resources of dignity and worth. We are migratory creatures meant to take turns, to look out for one another, to understand that the work is collective and the destination is shared.
I write these reflections for the Guyana Business Journal because I believe they speak powerfully to our national context. Guyana stands at a crossroads, blessed with newfound natural resources but burdened by historical divisions that too often fall along racial and ethnic lines. The question before us is whether we will allow the crooked places of our politics to remain crooked, whether we will permit mountains of privilege to grow higher while valleys of deprivation deepen, or whether we will embrace the hard but holy work of Isaiah’s vision.
This is not about importing American political categories into Caribbean soil. Rather, it is about recognizing that the moral topography Isaiah described is universal. Valleys exalted, mountains made low, crooked places made straight, rough places smooth, all flesh seeing together—these are not partisan prescriptions but prophetic principles applicable in Georgetown as in Washington, in Berbice as in Boston. The oil wealth flowing into our national coffers creates an unprecedented opportunity. Will we use it to exalt valleys or build higher mountains? Will we straighten crooked places or add more twists? Will we smooth rough places or make them rougher? The spiritual dimension of diversity, equity, and inclusion demands that we see these questions not as technical policy challenges but as tests of our national soul. Our diversity is not a problem to be managed but a gift to be celebrated. Our equity deficits are not unfortunate; they are unacceptable. Our inclusion failures are not political but prophetic concerns.
Senator Warnock spoke of Isaiah’s vision as describing a “superhighway carved in the desert for our God, an infrastructure of hope where everybody can get on that highway that runs through our humanity.” This is perhaps the most essential framing for those of us concerned with economic development and national progress: equity, integrity, and inclusion are not obstacles to development but the very infrastructure upon which sustainable development must be built. You cannot build a prosperous nation on a foundation of inequality and exclusion. You cannot maintain social cohesion when some communities systematically lack access to quality education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. You cannot claim to be developing when large segments of your population are being left behind or actively pushed back.
The moral topography Isaiah described is also the economic geography that research consistently shows produces the best outcomes for all. Nations with greater equity grow faster and more sustainably. Societies with stronger inclusion have higher social trust and lower transaction costs. Systems with more integrity attract investment and enable innovation. This is not about being nice or politically correct. This is about being smart and spiritually grounded. This is about recognizing that the prophetic vision and the pragmatic path actually converge.
Senator Warnock acknowledged that we live in difficult times. “Every now and then I grow weary,” he admitted, “and I have to beat back the winds of despair that beat against my own soul.” This honesty is refreshing. The work of justice is exhausting. The struggle for equity is unending. The fight for inclusion takes a toll. But he offered a response that moves beyond both naive optimism and cynical despair: “Don’t give in to those who are trying to weaponize despair. Don’t give in to those who are trying to overwhelm us, flood the zone and convince us that they’ve already won, because if you are convinced that they’ve already won, then you stop fighting, and when you stop fighting, you lose the battle.” Drawing on his Pentecostal roots, he declared, “I grew up in a tiny, little Pentecostal church where they told me greater is the one who is within me than the one who is within the world. And I was crazy enough to believe it.”
This is the word we need in Guyana, in the Caribbean, in the global South, in every place where people are working to build more just and inclusive societies. The forces of division and exclusion are real and powerful. They will try to convince us that equity is impossible, that inclusion is impractical, that diversity is dangerous. They will weaponize despair. But we have seen valleys exalted before. Senator Warnock himself—standing in the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr.’s spiritual home at Ebenezer Baptist Church, occupying a Georgia Senate seat once held by segregationists—is living testimony to this truth. We have seen mountains made low. We have witnessed crooked places straightened and rough places smoothed. The struggle continues, but the vision endures. Isaiah’s moral topography remains the true north by which we must navigate. “We’ve seen bigotry before,” Senator Warnock reminded us. “We’ve seen demagogues before. We’ve dealt with oppression before, but God knows how to take rough places and make them smooth.” He invoked the resilience of Black Americans: “They gave us the blues, and we made music. They gave us scraps, and we made soul food. They gave us the Bible and pointed over to Ephesians, where it says, ‘slaves obey your masters,’ and we could barely read. But somehow we stumbled into Exodus where God told Pharaoh to let my people go.” Rough places made smooth.
As a mathematician, I am drawn to the geometric precision of Isaiah’s vision. It describes transformations of the landscape, changes in elevation and alignment, and the creation of paths where none existed. These are not vague aspirations but specific operations: exalt, lower, straighten, smooth. In mathematics, we know that transformation is possible. Systems can be reordered. Functions can be inverted. Spaces can be remapped. What was high can be brought low. What was crooked can be made straight. The rough can be smoothed. It requires intention, effort, and sustained application of force in the right direction, but it is possible.
The same is true in the moral topography of society. Change is possible. Justice can be advanced. Equity can be increased. Inclusion can be expanded. But like mathematical transformations, these changes don’t happen automatically. They require intention, effort, and sustained application of moral force in the direction of righteousness.
This Sunday, in an unexpected visit to a chapel I did not plan to enter, I was reminded of why the language of faith sometimes expresses truths that escape secular vocabulary. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are not just policy preferences or political positions. They are spiritual imperatives, prophetic demands, divine intentions for the human community.
May we have the courage to exalt valleys, the humility to lower mountains, the integrity to straighten crooked places, the persistence to smooth rough places, and the expansive vision to see all flesh together in the realization of our common human dignity. This is the work. This is the way. This is God’s moral topography made manifest.
Terrence Blackman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and a frequent contributor to the Guyana Business Journal on matters of politics, economics, and social development.
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