""If I could, I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood.""
--from the Spiritual ""Elijah Rock""

Taking its theme from the pastoral letter of the Black Catholic bishops of the United States, which spoke of the challenge of being ""authentically Black and truly Catholic,"" To Stand on the Rock invites us ""to linger awhile in the garden of our imagination and try to see with the eyes of faith and art how the old ones . . . took a twisted version of Christianity and re-twisted it into a culture of liberation, transcendence, creativity and wholeness.""

Father Brown begins by...