Frederick Douglass and Shawn might not be the kind of people who come to mind when you hear the word meek. We usually think of a meek person as someone who’s passive or timid, someone who doesn’t stand up for herself. Aren’t the meek “the shy ones, the intimidated, the mild, the unassertive”?3 A. M. Hunter complained, “For the modern man … no Beatitude is more perplexing than this one. In it Jesus seems to be promising the meek the mastery of the world, when in fact everybody knows that the weak—