Tag Archives: Trinity Christian Academy

Banned Book Displays at Chamblin’s!

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As books are banned in schools across Florida, as teachers and students feel increasingly threatened by the State, as Florida politicians seek to make education “ideological,” saying, “Education is our sword,” banned book displays at Jacksonville’s Chamblin Bookmine and Chamblin’s Uptown encourage reading banned books and parents use banned book lists as shopping lists.

Ironic Innocence at Trinity Christian Academy

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It was pastor Bob Gray who gave my mother permission to marry the man who’d become my father in 1972. I didn’t attend the school until after my mother died. My 1989 yearbook is dedicated to Dennis Cassell, Trinity Christian Academy’s first football coach, who’d soon be fired for speaking out against how Trinity’s coverup of decades of child sexual abuse. Ironically, I miss my own innocence, and my few friendships, from those years. 

Eulogy for a “Heretic” at Collins Road Baptist Church

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It’s been 36 years since I’ve set foot in the church. I hadn’t expected a third of the congregation to be Mennonite. I hadn’t expected the eulogist to refer to the deceased as suspected heretic. I’d come to honor the memory of this smiling, wise, knowledgeable towering figure from my childhood who died from Covid-19. And for the memory of my childhood itself.

 

N.B. Forrest High School and the Other Pandemic: Opioid Addiction

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There’s a desperate addiction problem in every corner of the American landscape. This story is personal. It looks back 30 years to high school, to friendship, to youth, to what strange turns time takes with our lives, to how addiction can turn someone into a completely different person.

New Story: Collins Road Christian Academy

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My desk stood against this wall. Now there’s no roof above it. How could I not have known about the fire? This is the school I attended near the ends of both my mother’s life and my innocence. Here, I fell for a Filipina and my classmate’s death rocked the school. Even as all our righteousness was nothing but “filthy rags,” wickedness, in the menacing form of popular culture, knocked at the doors. Oh, but there was Popcorn Day!

Jefferson Davis Junior High School

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My father and I were the only white people on the basketball court. He was 40 years older, at least, than everybody else. I’m writing this story on his 96th. He died six months ago tomorrow. 

Of what beloved Jacksonville architect Taylor Hardwick thought of designing new schools with the names of Confederate leaders, there’s no record. The only black faces in 1960s Jeff Davis yearbooks are those of the custodial staff. And the school principal, Wilber C. Johnson, standing beside a Confederate flag and wearing blackface.

“We will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree. / We will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree. / We will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, / As we march along!”

Bebe Deluxe, Storybook Pride Prom, and the History of Gay Pride at Willowbranch Park and Library

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It’s the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, and at Willowbranch Library, an epicenter of gay rights history in Jacksonville, hundreds of supporters of gender and sexual minority young people rally in their defense after Jacksonville Public Libraries Director Tim Rogers canceled their sold-out Pride Prom.

Now there are two teen pride events, instead of one. The prom still takes place, at a now undisclosed location, a local church, and hundreds of supporters rally at Willowbranch Library to express their solidarity and love.

Hammond Boulevard Exit & the “Perfect Pedophile Paradise”

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Did God so love the world that he directed the Florida Department of Transportation to cut a new exit from Interstate-10 down to the northern entrance of what Dennis Cassell called Bob Gray’s “perfect pedophile paradise”? 

Whatever Tom Messer believed about God’s desires for his predecessor Bob Gray, whose sexual abuse of children Messer shielded from the law, he believes God wants 20,000 people daily to take the new I-10 exit by the church. 

So let’s do that. Let’s go. Here’s what we find.

New Story and Footnote: Old Trinity Baptist Church and Gray’s Grave

Pastor Robert Calhoun Gray told her, “I am like God in this church, and you are just a little girl.”

Lackawanna: Trinity Baptist Church

Marietta: Gray’s Grave

Bob Gray Elvis

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