Books by Thomas Davis

An uplifting, encouraging reminder that God works through his imperfect people.  Evangelism is crucial, it is urgent, it is exciting, it is wonderful. There is nothing more thrilling than to see God at work in people‿s lives and to see men, women, boys and girls discovering the incredible joy and peace that comes from knowing Jesus.   But it is also hard. Really hard. Often, sharing our faith with other people is the area of our Christian lives where we feel at our most useless.  The Bible contains a wealth of theological truth that is a powerhouse of encouragement for evangelism, including the basic truths that God is God and you are you. God is who he has always been: infinite, eternal, unchangeable, all‿powerful, at work in his world. You are you; you don‿t need to become someone you are not. God has not called a select group of elite Christians to tell the world about Jesus; he has chosen his weak, insecure, ineloquent people. He has chosen you.

Thirty years ago, tribal college educator and poet Thomas Davis began writing poems about the tribal college movement, beginning with the founding of College of Menominee Nation in Northern Wisconsin. He had no intention of developing a book out of the poems, using napkins and scraps of papers to create a mostly free verse poetry that chronicled the events and people trying to build a new kind of educational system that would preserve and evolve Indigenous language, history, and culture. Davis gave these poems away and many were lost. Until now. Meditation on the Ceremonies of Beginnings is a new kind of narrative poetry, an informal history of the tribal college movement and the World Indigenous Higher Education Consortium told through poetic verse. It recounts, as acclaimed poet Kimberly Blaeser (Ojibwe) says, "the liquid fire of oratory" becoming "the great song a movement sings." Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings captures the dreams and vision of Indigenous leaders in higher education. It tells their story, illuminating how two great movements set out to change the world and succeeded in a multitude of ways, both big and small.