Northwest African American Museum has a sparkling temporary exhibition of 10 years of photographs of James Baldwin taken by Sedat Pakay—and Pakay is in town Wednesday to talk about it. The talk is free, and starts at 6. (Details.)

From the ages of 14 to 17, in Harlem—in the 1930s, three decades before Pakay's photographs were taken in Turkey—Baldwin was a street-roving evangelist, a brief role (after his preacher father) that he writes about in the essay "To Crush a Serpent."

...you can glide through the Bible and settle for the prohibitions that suit you best.

The prohibitions that suit the fundamentalists best all involve the flesh.

And here I must, frankly, declare myself handicapped, even, or perhaps especially, as a former minister of the Gospel.

Salvation is not precipitated by the terror of being consumed in hell: this terror itself places one in hell. Salvation is preceded by the recognition of sin, by conviction, by repentance. Sin is not limited to carnal activity, nor are the sins of the flesh the most crucial or reverberating of our sins.

Makes me wonder: What are the most crucial and reverberating of my sins?

See you at the talk.