Deacon, author, radio host, revivalist and retired businessman, Deacon Art Miller is the former director of the Office for Black Catholic Ministries for the Archdiocese of Hartford. In addition to his assigned parishes, he is also the Catholic chaplain at Hartford’s Capital Community College.
A nationally known preacher of God’s Holy Scripture, he has traveled throughout the country raising the need of conversion to “Radical Love”. The kind of self-denying love that can only be accomplished through the grace and power offered to us through Jesus Christ. Deacon Miller has preached throughout the United States – from New England to the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast of Mississippi, from the Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico, to the south side of Chicago; he teaches and preaches Christ’s call to His life-changing “Radical Love”.
At public forums, houses of worship, schools and universities across the country, DeaconMiller addresses issues of social injustice. With firsthand knowledge he speaks to his audiences from the perspective of an African American who grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. DeaconMiller was 10 years old in 1955 when his schoolmate Emmett Till, age 14, was brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman — an incident that energized the nascent Civil Rights Movement. His book, The Journey to Chatham (published by AuthorHouse, 2005), details the historic events seen through the eyes of Emmett’s friends.
Today, Deacon Miller addresses 21st-century examples of the same intolerance. He is the Hartford Archdiocese representative to the Connecticut Coalition to Save Darfur, a group formed specifically to influence state, national, and international officials and institutions to use their political clout to stop the conflict in Darfur, Sudan. DeaconMiller sees such racial divisiveness as an example of “human hatred that is the result of what happens when one group seeks power by dehumanization.” Echoing the thoughts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he believes that as part of the great human experience, no one can sit idly tolerant of the great injustices that happen anywhere in the world.
“If God were to give us an 11th commandment,” Deacon Miller proposes, “I believe it would read: Thou shall not be a bystander.”
