Resources

Part Four: Ritual is a Form of Activism Engaging ritual as an individual or as a collective act of embodiment challenges ideas about the source and nature of our intelligence and for some it challenges ideas about how we arrive at knowing. As a form of activism, ritual invites us into the process of restorying that counters colonizing stories which perpetuate cultural and gender hegemony. Rituals also take the diverse traditions of old narratives and gives them meaning for the present context or need. The restorying in ritual also centers diverse intelligences (bodily-kinesthetic, environmental, rhythmic, visual, auditory, social, etc.,) in a nonhierarchical manner. It affords us to remember our own story in relationship to the transcendent, to remember a people’s story in relationship to the unseen yet felt power of spirit. Our ritual restorying is another form of both our personal and collective agency. Ritual focuses on lived and innate capacities that are in operation to benefit us and community. Imagine that – using our intelligence for our personal and collective benefit, not for institutions or capitalizing agendas. We get to use our restorying in ritual to practice “being” while welcoming others into the same practice. This is primarily the role of community participation in ritual; to show our authentic selves. Whether it is the restorying of a grief ritual, the restorying of a ritual for renewal and rebirth, a ritual of covenant or a ritual of invocation; the community’s role is to authentically show up. Here is where ritual begins to counter models of acceptability, belonging, worthiness posited by dominant forces or groups that exclude, marginalize, and perpetuate othering. If the intent is transformation and ethical change, ritual can construct a valid and mutually beneficial pathway for creating community strong enough to hold one another’s truths. 

In 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing a story about slavery. Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher, was a pastor of Presbyterian and Congregational congregations in New York and Connecticut before moving with his family to Cincinnati, Ohio, to serve as president of Lane Seminary, a Presbyterian institution, in 1832. As a young adult, Stowe attended a series of debates on abolition, colonization, and slavery at the seminary. These debates in 1834 stirred the fires of abolitionism among many of the students, which agitated the board of trustees, and Stowe’s father sought a compromise between the students seeking to be bolder and more strategic in their activism and the trustees urging the school to focus on theological subjects and training future clergy for pastoral leadership. Ultimately, fifty-one students decided to withdraw from the seminary. They published a statement protesting the institutional leadership of both the trustees and Beecher. The students detested institutional attempts to censor their activism on campus and accused the school’s leaders of cowardice and betraying the call of Jesus Christ: “Are our theological seminaries to be awed into silence upon the great questions of human duty? Are they to be bribed over to the interests of an unholy public sentiment, by promises of patronage or threats of its withdrawal?” Stowe’s literary career began to flourish around the same time as she began publishing many essays in various periodicals, but she returned to the topics discussed at Lane for her most famous and influential work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was first published in serial form in an abolitionist newspaper in 1851, and then in book form the following year. I presently teach at a different Presbyterian seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Though hundreds of miles and almost two centuries separate Columbia Seminary in 2023 from Lane Seminary in 1834, I believe the searing questions from the students departing Lane are hauntingly relevant at Columbia and other seminaries. Many of the conversations among faculty and administrators at Columbia are about the future of theological education. We talk about the promises and perils of online education, the joys and challenges of teaching multi-vocational students, and the pros and cons of reducing credit hours in certain degree programs. These are rich and necessary dialogues, but I also know that we are not addressing all of the “great questions of human duty.” I can’t help but feel that the busyness of strategic planning, with its accompanying committee meetings, listening sessions, bar graphs, and pie charts, has awed us into silence on Columbia’s historic sins and reparative justice. On June 15, 2020, the board of trustees and president’s council of Columbia issued a statement that entailed a “commitment to repair the breach.” Columbia’s leadership confessed that the seminary “came into being in the context of and participated in the subjugation and oppression of Black people.” This is an important acknowledgement of Columbia’s sinful past. But confession also requires addressing the totality of wrongdoing that lies at the foundational roots of the seminary. In 1834, six years after its founding and three years after its first classes, Columbia received $3,603.25 in its endowment from the sale of eighteen enslaved African Americans. Charles C. Jones, a white member of Columbia’s board who joined the faculty one year later, inherited four enslaved persons, a young woman named Cora and her three children, from Andrew Maybank, a white plantation owner in Liberty County, Georgia. In his will, Maybank also instructed Jones to sell fourteen of his other enslaved persons, with the proceeds directed to Columbia Seminary. Jones sold Cora and her three children in a private sale for $1,000. He also arranged for the other fourteen enslaved persons to be sold in a public auction for $2,603.25. This is but one of numerous instances in which money derived from the sale of enslaved persons flowed into Columbia’s endowment. In 1845, a journal published by the Associate Reformed Synod of the West excoriated Columbia for benefiting from a public auction of enslaved persons. The journal found it tragic to see human beings—“the following negro slaves, to wit: Charles, Peggy, Antonett, Davy, September, Maria, Jenny, and Isaac”—listed as property akin to animals, lands, and other capital in a local Savannah newspaper. But it was especially infuriated to behold a Presbyterian seminary in the listing as the recipient of the funds derived from the sale. The journal criticized the lack of shame or remorse from the seminary as “scandalous.” Columbia’s commitment to racial repair includes new scholarships that cover the entire cost of tuition and fees for every admitted African American student. As I have shared in an earlier reflection, I am exceedingly grateful to teach at a seminary that has the financial resources to support the students in my classroom. But there is one glaring omission in Columbia’s efforts to repair the breach: The absence of reparations to Cora’s descendants and the descendants of other enslaved persons who were sold to enrich the seminary’s endowment. In 2019, Virginia Theological Seminary designated 1.7 million dollars as a reparations endowment fund to identify and pay the descendants of Black persons who labored on its campus during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation. Three years later, the seminary reported that this fund increased to 2.2 million dollars and nearly 200 descendants had received payments. Virginia Seminary’s work toward reparative justice is simultaneously a model and an indictment of theological education. Surely it is not the only theological school that must atone for its historic sins of slavery and racial oppression. Both Columbia and Virginia are among the wealthiest theological institutions in the nation. In 2022, one magazine published a list with the ten schools holding the largest endowments: Princeton Seminary ($1.45 billion), Harvard Divinity School ($845 million), Yale Divinity School ($597 billion), Candler School of Theology ($352 million), Duke Divinity School ($291 million), Columbia Seminary ($284 million), Vanderbilt Divinity School ($277 million), Pittsburgh Seminary ($262 million), Perkins School of Theology ($248 million), and Virginia Seminary ($215 million). One question I sometimes encounter revolves around how institutions can make amends for injustices that happened so long ago. I often respond with an observation and a question. I recognize that many years have passed, and we have certainly witnessed some progress in the pursuit of racial justice. I then ask when a specific institution made things right and repaired relations with the families and descendants of the people it directly harmed. In the case of Columbia, the answer is not yet. There is much excitement about Columbia’s future with a desire to boldly step into the future of theological education with renewed purpose and new vision. But before revival there must be a reckoning.

I was on educational leave in the fall and working, primarily, on a religion and disability textbook. Of the many things I learned (one of which was how very little it turns out I know about religion, the subject for which I have my doctorate; this was humbling!), the fact that there is relatively little treatment of disability in religious studies became quite clear to me. Disability goes unmentioned in canonical texts in the field and introductory textbooks, including the one from which I assign chapters. Unless I was reading specific volumes devoted to the topic--or poking around our disciplinary journal, which we’re lucky to have--it rarely came up. As a person who attends to disability regularly in lots of parts of my personal and professional life (e.g., this recent presentation on inclusive pedagogy for AAR), I also have to admit that I haven’t really integrated disability into my courses, besides the specific one I teach on Religion and Disability. In the past, I’ve made no mention of disability in my lower-level, introductory Religions of the World classes or my upper-level electives, such as Religion and Film or Race and Religion. This is not the case with other markers of identity—gender, class, race—which I routinely note, represent, and try to get students to reflect on. A quick search of our Wabash blog posts shows that disability is not a popular topic. And, in general, “higher ed has been slow to recognize disability as an identity group or include it in programming around diversity and inclusion.” Some scholars, like Jay Domage in Academic Ableism, have even argued that higher education in the U.S. has been specifically designed to exclude people with disabilities. Disabled people account for the largest minority group in the world. On college campuses, we really don’t know just how many students and colleagues have a disability because there is so much underreporting, likely due to all the barriers to disclosure. It’s a lot, though. And, as with any demographic, including the religious, there is immense diversity within the disability community. Disabilities can range from hearing to learning, from movement to mental health. They can be lifelong, from birth, or shorter term. Some folks are proud of their disability and wouldn’t change it for the world, believing it gives them gifts and connections they wouldn’t have otherwise. Other folks with disabilities experience impairment and suffering and wish their lives had turned out differently. Some can pass, although it’s not always beneficial to them. Others have disabilities that are always or immediately apparent to others. Some people prefer “person-first” language (e.g., “a person with ADHD”); others prefer “identity-first” language (“a deaf person”), which allows them to claim, unapologetically, disability as a central and important part of who they are. People with the same disability can experience it very differently. What binds people together in this group is the way society is still not designed for them and the barriers they experience (environmental, social, legal) that result. Awareness and understanding about disability remains woefully lacking on college campuses. COVID has not helped. College students with disabilities experience discouragement, debasement, insecurity, isolation, and cycles of disempowerment. Accommodations are resisted, disabilities are disbelieved. And, when we talk about disability, we tend to think only of students. However, of course, our colleagues may have disabilities too. In our religion classrooms, we can assume there will be students with disabilities enrolled. We don’t need to wait for disclosure, some “accommodation” letter about a single person, to begin considering how to make our courses accessible and welcoming. Let’s be proactive, rather than reactive. This is the entire point of Universal Design for Learning, which I encourage everyone to spend time learning more about. (UDL benefits everyone, not just specific individuals with specific disabilities.) The gist is to preemptively assume variability and then to design for it, proliferating options and providing multiple entry points to the learning experience. (And yes, it’s also basic stuff like turning on closed captions whenever you show a video in class or making sure podcasts you assign have transcripts.) It’s about moving away from conceiving disability as deficit, to embracing the opportunities and assets of having a diverse student population in our classrooms.

I am an activist educator. What this means is that I strive for justice both in and outside the classroom. I utilize critical or liberatory pedagogies as my theoretical bases. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire said, liberatory pedagogy involves linking the word with the world. In my thirty-three years of teaching at Agnes Scott College, I have brought the things I care about, both people and policy, into my teaching. In my classes students connect with the community, both on and off campus, through practicums with local organizations and guest speakers and walking tours of the city. I work hard not to “indoctrinate” students—as if that were even possible—and to create bold spaces with my students to engage complex social and political issues. Democratic education is not “sit and git,” a phrase I recently heard an abolitionist teacher repeat to describe his resistance methods in his high school classes. It is embodied, hands-on, messy, moving, imperfect, risky, playful, and shared. The day before classes began this semester, my college announced they were extending the contract with Aramark over food service staff to the entire campus, from not previously outsourced (Facilities) to already outsourced (HVAC, electrical, and landscaping). The announcement was planned to be for Facilities only, but student leaders in our living wage campaign and some key faculty leaders organized a protest by showing up at that meeting. There is a quote from the Aramark head guy that summarizes the neoliberal take over: “Higher education needs to transform itself and get more like business and industry and understand how they can lower costs and improve service levels.” This quote exposes what James Lawson labelled “plantation capitalism” (also known as “plantation politics”), the extension of the legacy of slavery into our current economic labor relationships. My facilities colleagues are reacting with phrases such as: “We’ve been sold.” Many of us students, alumnae, faculty, and staff feel we are experiencing the caving in of whatever moral center our institution had. We are protesting as I type this blog. I have been outspoken in this movement for three decades, so students know I have firm opinions about economic justice on our campus. How do I create a bold space in the classroom for differing opinions? A favorite educator of mine, historian Howard Zinn, put in his course syllabi the following statement: This is not an “objective” course. I will not lie to you, or conceal information from you because it is embarrassing to my beliefs. But I am not a “neutral” teacher. I have a point of view about war, about racial and sexual inequality, about economic injustice—and this point of view will affect my choice of subject, and the way I discuss it. I ask you to listen to my point of view, but I don’t expect you to adopt it. You have a right to argue with me about anything, because, on the truly important issues of human life there are no “experts.” I will express myself strongly, as honestly as I can, and I expect you to do the same. I am not your only source of information, of ideas. Points of view different from mine are all around, in the library, in the press. Read as much as you can. All I ask is that you examine my information, my ideas and make up your own mind. (Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian. New York: South End Press, 2002, p. 29) Whether acknowledged or not, all pedagogy is a pedagogy of place; the place of our classroom and campus, in concentric circles out, and back. This fall I began my third semester teaching a first-year required Leadership 101 course. My topic is “Religion and Economic Justice.” The beginning point is an “economic autoethnography,” a way for students to tap into their own intersectional social locations to understand economic (in)justices. The class of seventeen students is diverse, with a majority of students of color, with former refugees, international students, first generation students, along with several from single-parent, low income families. Some examples of writing prompts from this autoethnography assignment include: What is your understanding of social class from your own background? Tell a story. What is your own labor history? Your parents? Your grandparents? What institutional manifestations of classism have you seen and/or experienced? (e.g. health care, employment, education, etc.) In what ways has your social location and identity and also experience of social class and labor influenced your definition of “leadership”? What role has religion had (directly or indirectly) in your understanding of social class, classism, economic justice, and leadership? In this course students learn about our campus living wage campaign, work with a homeless shelter across the street from the college, engage leaders in local economic justice movements (the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights, the Georgia Poor Peoples Campaign, and the film director of the new documentary No Address: Part 2: On the Criminalization of the Homeless in Atlanta) and national movements (in particular the Poor People’s Campaign: The Call for a Moral Revival). From their own personal stories, students dive into leadership stories—from student leaders in the living wage campaign, to more well-known leaders from the past or present (e.g. James Lawson, Bishop William Barber, Rev. Liz Theoharis, Grace Lee Boggs, M.L. King, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Hosea Williams, Dolores Huerta, Bayard Rustin, and others) as a framework for reflecting on their encounters during the semester. As we engage the real time and real world happenings of economic injustice and movements to build a better world in the here and now and for those who come after us, I want my students to wrestle, as I do, with really complex issues for which I do not have “the answer” or solution.  And I invite them, in the words of Myles Horton of the Highlander Research Center, “to make the road by walking” for “the long haul.”

At the heart of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy is the dictum of “reading the word and reading the world.” As a literacy specialist who worked with Brazilian peasants, Freire learned from these students the necessity of making the connection with their lived experience. Teaching for social change takes participants beyond the “I am the teacher/you are the student” hierarchical model. I have learned that the democratic sharing of knowledges is more possible when a class connects the social justice issues, we are studying with the community just beyond our campus. Learning becomes a series of dialogues with texts and issues and the organizations who are working for immediate and systemic change. The social justice organization nearest to my campus is an emergency shelter for families less than a block from campus, Decatur Cooperative Ministry (founded in 1969). Their motto is: “Short-term shelter. Long term self-reliance.” DCM began as an interfaith response to poverty and homelessness in Decatur, GA. Their ministries grew with the gaps caused by economic inequality over the years to address needs of transitional housing, financial literacy, and food insecurity. They work toward the goal of permanent housing and family success. DCM is part of a local network of organizations addressing economic injustices in the Atlanta area. DCM’s emergency housing is aptly called “Hagar’s House.” For over twenty-five years, my introductory-level Bible class has worked in partnership with this shelter as a “practicum” or small internship that is supervised by DCM staff. Students provide various assistance: tutoring with children after school, serving as lead volunteers at weekly dinners or as overnight hosts, working the main desk, providing web and social media ideas and support, assisting in financial literacy classes, or collecting food from the local food bank. Students study poverty and housing inequities locally (through the Decatur Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights) and nationally (with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival). My classes are diverse, with South Asian refugees, first generation college students, and a few who have experienced homelessness at some point during their lives. We take risks as we engage the social issues in the world, and we prepare for our onsite work by engaging issues of race and class, along with our stereotypes and questions. This semester we are writing blogs for the DCM newsletter on the biblical Hagar from Genesis 16 and 21 (and beyond). Blog writing emerged during the pandemic as a need identified by DCM when we had to pivot to a virtual classroom, and working with young children onsite was not an option. Our partner organization identified their needs, and they wanted to highlight our blogging as a way to give something concrete back to the staff that is useful for their member congregations, staff, board, and clients. Students are writing these blogs on Hagar along with a reduced onsite practicum. We are first engaging the scholarship on Hagar from womanist and feminist perspectives. And we are reading poetry (Mohja Kahf) and a dramatic piece (Kathryn Blanchard). Hagar as Black, Egyptian, slave, surrogate, mother, aunt, homeless, bold namer of the deity (as El Roi, the One Who Sees), and matriarch of Islam are main areas of investigation. Our community partner would like its supporters to know more about their shelter’s namesake. Students will encounter Hagar in the biblical text, in scholarship and literary imaginations, and in their work in the second half of the semester with those who live at Hagar’s House. Students will serve and share meals, open doors and supply cabinets, play with children in the community room and design programs, and begin conversations. They will explore the root and systemic causes of poverty and housing and food insecurity in the US through one nonprofit organization’s commitment to meeting emergency needs and working toward systemic social justice. We are mapping the past—the biblical stories of poverty and displacement—as well as the current ones on our campus and in our neighborhood. What I have discovered over these years of partnership is that discoveries also happen beyond the classroom walls. Engaging the complex issues of systemic poverty and homelessness takes concrete form in the faces and lives of the staff and clients at DCM. The Hagar of the Bible and Qur’an continues her story—this time in her own words.

When I was writing this post, an American congressional representative is being criticized for Islamophobic remarks about a fellow member of Congress in what is just the latest example of anti-Muslim sentiment in American culture. In a widely publicized video, Colorado representative Lauren Boebert claims that she had a chance encounter with representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Somali American and one of the few Muslim women in Congress. Describing the moment when the two representatives found themselves in the same elevator, Boebert concluded that there was no threat to her life because Omar wasn’t wearing a backpack. Boebert’s reliance on Islamophobia to galvanize political support reveals how entrenched anti-Muslim racism is in American culture. Negative and discriminatory attitudes towards Muslims, and anyone perceived as Muslim, is a historical and continuing problem that needs to be addressed in the religious studies classroom not only by scholars of Islam, but by anyone teaching about religion in its historical, sociological, and political dimensions. In several years of teaching about Islam in the American university classroom and in public outreach, I have used diverse approaches and materials to educate about the problem of Islamophobia as a historical trend and as a part of contemporary culture. In this post I will describe how highlighting an often-overlooked aspect of American history is an effective method to challenge primary claims about Islam and Muslims created by Islamophobic attitudes in an American context. In short, teaching the history of the earliest American Muslims is a key strategy to combat anti-Muslim sentiment because their lives and contributions undercut arguments that Islam, and Muslims, are un-American or foreign to American culture. Many students are surprised to discover the long history of Muslims in the Americas, which has its origins in the seventeenth-century slave trade. Scholars estimate that anywhere from ten to twenty percent of the Africans forced onto slave ships bound for the American colonies were Muslim. Many of these Muslims were raised in West African Sufi communities and educated in religious sciences such as the Qur’an and the hadith literature. They were also often multilingual and knew the native African language of their families as well as the Arabic necessary for competency in reading Islamic texts and commentaries. The stories we have are mostly of Muslim men, who were often regarded as exotic because of their literacy and entrepreneurship. While many Muslim slaves were forced to convert to Christianity or pretended to in order to survive, others were respected for adhering to a religious tradition that, like the Christianity of slave owners, was monotheistic. Some of these Muslims became celebrities during their lifetime, such as Yarrow Mamout of Georgetown, who was able to purchase his freedom due to a successful brick-making business. Omar ibn Sayyid is known as the first Muslim slave to compose his autobiography in 1831. This document, written first in Arabic and later translated into English, offers a unique perspective on history, self-expression, and religious identity in the context of the bodily and intellectual domination that slavery required. The stories of emancipated Muslim slaves living on Georgia’s Sapelo Island offers evidence of women’s religious lives in terms of the ritual prayers they engaged in, and the traditional saraka cakes they made as part of West African Muslim celebrations. Acknowledging the earliest histories of American Muslims is an important step that undercuts Islamophobic claims that Muslims don’t belong in American society and cultural life. Put simply, African Muslim slaves lived in what would become the United States before that idea had been fully articulated and independence from Britain had been declared. It is also important to point out that these Muslim slaves, like all of the enslaved, literally built the American nation with their labor. The lives of these Muslim men and women also help to complicate mainstream assumptions regarding the identities of the enslaved, from their socioeconomic backgrounds in Africa to their literacy and their religious identities. There are many ways to extend these threads introduced with examination of the earliest American Muslims. One could follow this with a unit on how Muslim histories, values, and texts served Black Americans during the twentieth-century Civil Rights movement. Muslim communities in cities such as Chicago offered crucial safety and security to Black women who sought refuge from gendered discrimination and benefitted from vocational training provided by Muslim organizations such as the Nation of Islam. I draw on the lives and leadership of prominent Black American Muslims such as Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X to show how Islam offered an empowering identity that was, crucially, not the Christian identity of many white Americans opposed to racial equality. I also believe it is important to use these histories to show that the religious character of the Civil Rights movement is more than the Christianity that informed the work of Martin Luther King Jr., among others. Learning about the role of Islam during the Civil Rights movement shows students how Muslims inspired by Islamic concepts helped to shape civic discourse at a formative moment in American history. Highlighting these histories in the classroom provides an opportunity for students to rethink how they define Islam and how they define America. It raises awareness of the fact that Muslims helped to build some of the very institutions that are the foundation of the American nation. The Muslim history of the United States is an essential and valuable tool for educators looking to help students criticize the problem of growing anti-Muslim racism in our current political and cultural moment.

Having practiced on my first-year students for a few years [Race in the Classroom #1   Race in the Classroom #2], I felt brave enough to add several readings on race at once to my junior level course, Is God Dead? It was a good time to do it because I was revising the course anyway, converting it from a philosophy elective into a Catholic intellectual tradition course, fulfilling a gen ed requirement here at my small and mostly white Catholic college in the Northeast (I’m white too). In revising, I had to go outside traditional philosophy – the standard philosophy of religion course reader has no readings on race or on Catholicism. I ignored the fact that I’m a philosopher and looked for resources in theology instead. I soon stumbled into Black theology. Then I used Google. A lot. I’ve included race in two units on my syllabus so far: 1.Re-imagining God: Metaphors for the 21st Century I revised my old unit on metaphors about God into Re-imagining God: Metaphors for the 21st Century. We discuss the role of metaphor; we ask whether literal descriptions of God are possible; we consider better and worse metaphors. I added several readings on how images depicting God and Jesus as white men dominate religious art, asking if and how that matters and why it may be important to depict them as people of color and/or as women. We look at how this issue came up in the civil rights movement and how it has reemerged more recently. This unit quickly became one of the strongest parts of the class. The students like it because it is relevant and has pictures. I like it because invites reflection in three areas that are crucial to my course goals: Self: Students quickly notice that even though they believe that God has no body, they find images of God as anything other than a white man jarring. What does that mean, how does this automatic association of power and white men affect their actions and attitudes, and what can we do about it? Society: These images include some and exclude others, and they both reflect and reinforce existing power structures. How does that power structure affect people’s lives inside organized religion, and how can we make things better? Should we insist on diverse images in our churches? Relationship with God. Our initial reactions in encountering a nontraditional picture God highlights our tendency towards idolatry. We constantly confuse our image of God with God. Since the images fall short and can have such a negative social impact, would we be better off without images of God? Maybe Jews and Muslims are onto something here? This semester, my class added another question: Are we obsessing too much about images? The students pointed to a religious and a social danger: If we focus too much on what Jesus looked like, we may neglect his message. If we worry too much about visual representation, we may settle for symbolic change. 2.Black suffering A work in progress: I’m adding readings on black suffering to the Problem of Suffering unit. William Jones argues that given how much and how disproportionately blacks have suffered, it’s reasonable to conclude that God is a white racist. James Cone disagrees. I haven’t taught this unit yet. But I will! 3.Learning more myself without going crazy The voice in my head saying that I don’t know enough to teach this stuff is still there, but I’m resolutely ignoring it and teaching anyway, remembering that my students know a lot less about it than I do. I’m also educating myself one small step at a time. I read a couple of articles on Black liberation theology over the summer so that I would at least know more than what’s in the Wikipedia entry. Last spring, I stuck to Wikipedia. It worked. I still know much less than I’d like. I want a better idea of how we ended up with our current images of Jesus. (I get why he is white, but why the long hair?) I’d like to understand how white mainstream theologians responded to black liberation theology. And I’d like a better sense of the Catholic church’s position and record on race. But I didn’t figure any of that out over the summer. I needed to rest, and I had other responsibilities too. Next time!   See the PART #1 and PART #2 of this series. Resources Metaphors for the 21st Century Braxton, Edward K. “The Racial Divide in the United States: A Reflection for the World Day of Peace 2015.” Cleage, Albert B., Jr. The Black Messiah. Reprinted in Black Theology: A Documentary History, Volume I, 1966-1979. Edited by James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore. New York: Orbis Books, 1993. (Selections) Douglas, Kelly Brown. The Black Christ. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2019. (Selections on Cleage) Massingale, Bryan N. “The Challenge of Idolatry for LGBTI Ministry.” DignityUSA.org, 2019. NCR editorial staff. “Why white Jesus is a problem.” National Catholic Reporter, June 30, 2020. Rosales, Harmonia. The Creation of God (a recreation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam). Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, 2018. Schaeffer, Pamela, and John L. Allen Jr. “Jesus 2000.” National Catholic Reporter, 1999. The Problem of Suffering William R. Jones. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. New York: Anchor Press, 1973. Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1975. (Selections) Standard Philosophy of Religion course reader Pojman, Louis, and Rea, Michael. Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. 7th edition. Stamford, CT : Cengage Learning, 2015.

Talking about race in the classroom makes me nervous. What if a white student says something awful and I don’t know how to handle it? What if I don’t know the facts? What if something blows up and I end up in big trouble? And isn’t it irresponsible of me to teach something I don’t know enough about? Since race is so charged and complex, it’s tempting to leave it to experts. But I’m teaching at a small and predominantly white Catholic college in the Northeast (I’m white myself), and I largely teach gen ed to first-year students. We regularly teach outside our areas of expertise. And since very few of us specialize in race, our students won’t learn anything about it if non-experts avoid the topic. That seems unacceptable, so I’m teaching race even though I’m uneasy. After all, fear isn’t always a good reason to avoid something. I tell my students that all the time. I also believe that my fears are out of touch with reality. Of course, awful outcomes are possible. But they aren’t likely. I’m a good listener, I’m tenured, and my students are decent human beings who try to be kind, considerate, and non-racist. And I don’t have to stay ignorant: I can read, listen, and practice. Since I started engaging the topic of race in my classes,  I’ve improved. I know the subject better, I can sometimes anticipate what students will say and how and if to respond, and I’m better at managing the conversation. Most importantly, I’ve figured out how to create a reasonably safe classroom in which to have these conversations: We don’t start with race. Many of my first-year gen ed students have a hard time speaking in front of the class. They need to practice speaking and they need to trust me and each other before we tackle more controversial topics. My syllabus says that I’m still learning and that I expect to learn from my students, and I tell them that repeatedly. They don’t believe me, so I demonstrate it. I mess up and thank them when they correct me. I ask them to explain things I don’t know, and we build on those explanations whenever possible. When they tell me something cool, I write it down. I show them that I’m still engaged in the messy process of learning and that I’m willing to learn from them. We establish guidelines for discussions early on, and we revisit them before we embark on trickier topics, like race. I mention my discomfort and let them confess theirs, and then we talk about why it might be important to talk about difficult subjects anyway. I give them several ways of providing feedback and to ask questions, and I make some of them anonymous. I request feedback, especially if I suspect there’s a problem. If I don’t know how to handle something, I ask them (and others) for ideas. When I screw up, I apologize and try again. I learn and I grow. Through it all, I keep a nervous eye on my students of color. I might be worrying too much about the impact of these conversations on them. It’s uncomfortable for some of them, and of course I want to minimize their suffering. But my fears tell me that they could break. And that seems unlikely. They have almost certainly heard much worse. Still, students of color are badly outnumbered in my classroom, and while some of them are fine talking to a room full of white people about race, others aren’t. I email them beforehand and give them options: Let me know if it gets too uncomfortable. It’s OK if you don’t want to say anything – and it’s OK if you want to talk a lot too. Some say they’re fine, and some don’t answer. But some acknowledge that it will be difficult, and then we come up with ways of making it a little easier. Some of them end up talking a lot, others stay quiet in class but write to me, and others yet stay entirely silent. I make space for those who want to speak and then get out of the way as much as possible. In the spring, one of my quiet black first-years wrote a paper about our classroom discussion of race. She criticized my talking about discomfort, arguing that white people’s fears about discussing race express white fragility and that we need to get over it. She made a good case. So I’m trying to get over it and I’m reflecting on how to incorporate her insights into my course. Both the course and the getting over it are works in progress. Baby steps. *Read the first blog of this series here. **Watch for the third blog in this series in January.

For Gloria Anzaldúa, the borderlands are rooted in US-Mexico geopolitics in which the border wall is both a socializing project and an everyday policing structure. Although Anzaldua’s activist hermeneutic of the borderlands has a state of transcendence in view, it remains politically grounded given that her experience with borderlands is inextricably tied to a US-inflicted social wound on the people and the landscape. Here, political activism functions as a spiritual exercise, which, for Anzaldúa, was achieved through the power of the pen. In essence, her recourse to writing as a political act stemmed from her understanding of the power that archives have in defining identities and shaping social realities. In this sense, the border wall functions as an archive of US imperialism, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiments. Through her writings, therefore, she aims to trespass on this archive, or more specifically cross the border wall by offering a counter-reading of the history, culture, and beauty of ethnic Mexicans. The notion of border wall as both politics and an archive speaks to how borders and walls in general are the result of a cultural value system and shared social beliefs about the Other. The southern border walls separating the US from Mexico are a reality based on the widespread belief that ethnic Mexicans are entirely inferior and hence more prone to criminality. The genealogy of such myths can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century and the expansionist ideology of Anglo-American Manifest Destiny. This ideology relied heavily on a theology of providence, which, in turn, made the Anglo Protestant Church its most ideal ambassador. Thus, any trespassing on the archives that legitimate the current southern border wall must be attentive to the North American Church and its scientific and literal uses of scripture. For those churches acting more as agents of the state, crossing the border wall is considered not just a crime against the state but even more a sin against God. This conflation of state agenda and divine will is also operative in chaplaincy services provided in US immigration detention facilities, to the extent that convicted border crossers are led to accept detention and deportation as part of their Christian duty. In the US-Mexico borderlands, border-crossing points to a transgressive act; yet for an activist hermeneutic of the borderlands, this act of transgression can be harnessed in a methodological way, especially as it pertains to the interpretation of scripture and its interpreters. Just as Anzaldúas’ notion of borderlands helps us to reframe the hermeneutical enterprise as an awareness of and interchange with otherness, taking up border-crossing as a decolonizing reading strategy cannot avoid the US-Mexico border writings of Américo Paredes. Because Paredes’s border-crossing strategy operates primarily as a response to US expansion over Mexico’s northern territory, it is attuned to not only “border wall as archive” but also to “border wall as a colonizing discourse.” When applied to an activist hermeneutic of the borderlands, border-crossing as a strategy for reading scripture implies a transdisciplinary engagement with the biblical text and its interpreters. Although crossing and converging multiple-theoretical discourses is essential, the lives of everyday people in the borderlands attunes our social justice gaze toward the material and spiritual suffering of people rather than ideas alone. As Paredes reveals in his discursive border-crossings, the lived experiences of border people often fall out of view in the professional theoretical literature and hence in the classroom. The cultural values and rules of self-making that govern disciplinary boundaries tend to dismiss the cultural productions of the colonized Other, arguing that they lack critical-thinking skills, leadership instincts, and refined aesthetics. Crossing over the borders that regulate the dominant hermeneutical enterprise with the cultural archive of those wounded by US border walls is not only a transgressive move but more importantly a liberating strategy for minoritized communities of faith. Their lived experiences with empire, violence, and forced migration serve as a vital commentary to biblical texts that bear witness to some of the same wounds. Here the lived commentary of border people and the human traces in the biblical text interact in kinship ways, from common themes to the postcolonial traumatic condition. By transgressing the boundaries of the dominant hermeneutical enterprise in this way, readers expose the synthetic nature of various Western scientific methods and their inability to deliver on their positivistic promises. Also, the lived commentary of border people emerges with increased value within the professional literature, which, in turn, may lead to their revaluation in the social justice realm.

I’m teaching about race more and more these days. That wasn’t my plan. My training is in ancient Greek philosophy and I used to love teaching Aristotle and Plato. But things changed. Ten years ago, the ancient thinkers were great at helping the first-year students at my small Catholic college in the Northeast reflect on the world, society, and themselves. I can’t get it to work anymore. Because my first-years don’t read very well, the ancient writers are increasingly inaccessible to them. And they keep requesting more readings by people of color, women, and people who identify as LGBTQ. This befuddled me for years. I wasn’t assigned a single reading by a person of color in my philosophy grad school program, the only women we read were commentators, and all LGBTQ writers we studied were closeted, at least in their writings. None of this bothered me. I was interested in ideas, not people! Three things changed. First, I realized that marginalized people added different ideas to the conversation. They stressed different issues, and they challenged shared assumptions. Second, my students did better work when I assigned a more diverse set of readings. Third, our students of color began asking us to teach students more about race. They politely didn’t add that white faculty members like me should learn some stuff about race too, but it was implied. All this took on new urgency with the rise and power of the Black Lives Matter movement. I realized that to make sense of the world and their own role in it, our students need to understand race better, and they need to get better at talking about it without getting defensive or shutting down. And of course, I need to get better at it too. But how do I teach anything connected to race in a responsible manner when I know so little myself? This stumped me for a long time. I had trouble finding readings that felt right to me. And when I came up with something, I remembered that including only one thing by an author of color is tokenism, a sin possibly worse than an all-white syllabus. And then I was paralyzed again. I eventually decided to live with tokenism and to start small and simple: I just added Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to my first-year gen ed class, combining it with Plato’s Crito to create a unit on civil disobedience and nonviolence. Once I felt comfortable teaching King, I gradually added other materials: Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet.” Selections from his Autobiography. Veena Cabreros-Sud’s “Kicking ass.” This semester, I added King’s arguments for nonviolence. Next semester, I might add a discussion on anger or a chapter by James Cone on nonviolence and Christianity. And I’m hunting around for a good video on the civil rights movement. I still feel like an imposter teaching this unit, especially when pedagogy requires me to speak as Malcolm X (I sometimes worry that there are secret videos). But I also know that it’s usually one of the most effective units in the class. Students who have seemed bored are suddenly interested. My (very few) black students get a chance to show off because unlike most of my white students, they usually know something about Malcolm X. Students bring up connections to the Black Lives Matter movement, and we try to think through what has changed and what remains the same. I still don’t know enough. My course could be diverse in a better way. Right now, all the black authors are talking about race, they are in a single unit, and they are almost all men. It’s a work in progress. But most of my white students have never heard of Malcolm X or a sit-in. What I do is much better than nothing and I learn a bit more each time I teach it. Perfectionism is the enemy here. It usually is. It’s OK to start small. Add a single piece. Don’t worry about how it fits into the course as a whole – students usually don’t see the overall structure anyway. Try and see how it goes. Next time, do a little more, do it a little better, or try something different. Learn. Grow. *Watch for two additional blogs in this series in December and January.   Resources Cabreros-Sud, Veena. “Kicking ass.” In To be real, edited by Rebecca Walker. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Cone, James. Martin and Malcolm in America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992. Cone, James. God of the oppressed. New York, Seabury Press, 1975. (See especially Chapter 9: Liberation and the Christian Ethic.”) hooks, bell. “Killing rage: Militant resistance.” In Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. King, Martin Luther, Jr. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. New York, HarperCollins, 1986. (In addition to “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” see also chapter 15: “Nonviolence,” and 18: “Where Do We Go from Here?”) Mantena, Karuna. “Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Politics.” In To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Srinivasan, Amia. “In Defence of Anger.” Four Thought, BBC Radio 4, 2014. X, Malcolm. “Ballot or the Bullet.”1964. (Transcript here and audio here.)