Elaine Klaassen

Spirit and Conscience, columns by Elaine Klaassen

Elaine started at Southside Pride in 1996 selling ads, maintaining the religion calendar and writing articles that eventually became a column called Spirit and Conscience.


‘A Nest in My Heart’

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN When I was in my 20s I often talked about how important it was for people to write about their lives and their thoughts, and how much it would expand one’s consciousness to read about the inner life, observations and experiences of others. It seems that more…

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Writers create community

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN I’ve started going to two writing groups that have sprung up in our neighborhood. I go every time because I love words, language and people and that’s what these groups are about. I consider myself quite limited when it comes to imagination and since I wrote factual…

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Trip to Africa is life-changing

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Steve Floyd (not related to George Floyd) has been taking Black youth from South Minneapolis on trips to Africa since the early ’90s. Floyd feels that traveling to Africa is one thing that really works to help them heal from the effects of slavery throughout their history.…

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Competing options for rent control

BY CAM GORDON The rent control debate is heating up. With the city’s rent stabilization workgroup completing its work in December, it now falls to the City Council to approve a policy and draft an ordinance if we are to have rent stabilization in Minneapolis. On Dec. 13, the 25-member…

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Born with a mission

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Steve Floyd is a man with a heart for others. He has raised four children—the fifth is still under his supervision; he nurtures dozens of other youth through the Agape Movement and through his work as a mental health counselor at Change, Inc.; he makes award-winning photographs;…

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Marquise

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN I met Marquise Bowie at George Floyd Square in February of 2021 on a day commemorating the assassination of Malcolm X. I introduced myself because he was wearing an Agape hoodie, which identified him as belonging to the group I had wanted to write about for a…

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Tribute to Disco T

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Disco T was a well-known DJ in Minneapolis. He died of brain cancer on Dec. 31, 2021. At his memorial event, on his birthday, Feb. 19, everyone spoke of him as a legend, an icon. He was beloved and admired. I knew him by his given name…

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Bethany Lutheran Church closed Sept. 12

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN “The Times They Are A-changin’ ” is ever true. Sunday, Sept. 12, was a “bittersweet” morning, said Bethany’s Pastor Jeffrey Schulz at the final worship service of Seward neighborhood’s Bethany Lutheran Church. An ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) congregation at 25th and Franklin Avenues, it was…

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Brought together in sorrow and a hope for justice…

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN The day before Easter, 2021, I went to George Floyd Square to meet with Marquise Bowie, a member of Agape, and Marcia Sanoden, a “make-the-world-a-better-place” reader of Southside Pride, to talk about her offer to volunteer at Agape and what that might encompass. But we didn’t sit…

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Agape: What does love look like?

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN If you go to 38th and Chicago, the corner where George Perry Floyd Jr. was killed by a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on his neck, you will see that the people have claimed the intersection as a free state, an autonomous zone of nonviolence and anti-racism. They…

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