Resources
Dr. Himanee Gupta-Carlson Assistant Professor SUNY Empire State College Three stories capture my take on how race matters. Story #1 opens in a grocery parking lot. I park my car and open the door. Trying to remember what I need to buy, I do not notice the pick-up truck beside me as I step out. Then, I hear a male voice bellowing at me to close my door and stop ruining his truck. Hurriedly, I close the door. I apologize and check his vehicle for damages. The man shouts a little louder, glares at me, and revs up his engine...
Maureen H. O'Connell, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Theology & Chair of Department of Religion LaSalle University If there is one thing I’ve learned from my 20 students in a new course, “Religion and Racism in America” this semester it’s this: how we go about engaging racism in the classroom may be just as important, if not more, than what sources we use to do so. 1. Racism is not an intellectual reality, but an experiential one. Critical race theorist George Yancy is right (not that I ever doubted him!). Racism is an embodied experience and not simply a sociological phenomenon, no...
Jocelyn McWhirter, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Religious Studies Albion College The time: November 9–10, 1938. The place: Germany. The casualties: More than 7,000 Jewish shops along with 1,574 synagogues damaged or destroyed. One hundred Jews murdered; 30,000 imprisoned in concentration camps. They were the first victims of a racial purge that went on to claim more than 6 million lives. Now, 76 years after Kristallnacht, I am preparing to lead the Holocaust Studies Service-Learning Project (HSSLP). The HSSLP was founded in 1999 by students in a first-year seminar on the Holocaust. They wanted to take their learning out of the..
Mara Brecht, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Theology St. Norbert College Teaching race is a boulder. And up the mountain I push it. When I teach race, I feel like Sisyphus because I never seem to get anywhere. The questions repeat and the anxieties recur each semester. It’s always the same: I know what parts of assigned texts will provoke students. I’m prepared for the discomfort, the tears, and the under-the-breath comments. I can even hear the conversations before they happen: White students indignantly protest Peggy McIntosh’s essay on white privilege: “But I had to earn what I have!” They respond...
Lerone A. Martin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of religion and politics in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics Washington University I have heard much talk about Ferguson and racial segregation in my personal life, as well as in the classroom. Conversations about Ferguson abound in my Civil Rights class this semester as well as in the broader university community. It could hardly be otherwise. We are just fifteen miles away from Canfield Drive. As a historian, I aim to help my students understand Ferguson, racial segregation, and all concomitant issues in a broader historical framework. How did we...
Kyle J. A. Small, Ph.D. Associate Academic Dean and Associate Professor for Church Leadership Western Theological Seminary The faculty at Western Theological Seminary (WTS) in Holland, MI recently invested itself in Willie James Jennings’ book, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). Three faculty members were invited to take up Jennings' claim and call, and to generate a conversation in terms of how Jennings’ work intersects with our shared task of teaching and learning. I engaged as a pastoral theologian wondering what are the pedagogical implications if we accept Jennings' book, on his own...
Marcia Y. Riggs, Ph.D. J. Erskine Love Professor of Christian Ethics Columbia Theological Seminary Why does an African American woman--a Womanist black liberationist religious ethicist-- in her right mind teach for twenty-three years in a historically white seminary in the South? I have asked myself this question many, many times, and most of those times in prayer on my knees to a God that I am sure is the “one that I have found in myself” and love fiercely (re: Ntozake Shange). There you have the answer: there is this call to teach that is the “fire in my bones”...
Nekeisha Alayna Alexis Coordinator Intercultural Competence and Undoing Racism Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary Safwat Marzouk Assistant Professor of Old Testament Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary Recent spates of lethal violence against people of color—and black men and women in particular— are devastating reminders of the high cost of unaddressed oppression. The race- and class-based killings of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; John Crawford in Beavercreek, Ohio; Eric Gardner in Staten Island, New York; and Renisha McBride in Dearborn Heights, Mich.; to name a few, undercut illusions of how close we are to a “post-racial” or just society. However, these tragedies must...
Rev. Gerald C. Liu, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Homiletics and Worship Arts Drew Theological School I teach preaching at Drew Theological School. Two sets of questions guide my pedagogy. One involves hermeneutics: I compel my students to ask, ‘How does “preaching” manifest beyond our words and in the larger world?’ and ‘Why should we pay attention to what others have to say?’ The other set wrestles with theodicy: ‘How do we keep the faith when our words do not suffice?’ The killing of Michael (Mike) Brown haunts those homiletic interrogatives because he made a proclamation before being gunned down. Brown.
Greg Carey, Ph.D. Professor of New Testament Lancaster Theological Seminary My friend Chuck Melchert took a significant risk once when we were playing a round of golf together. Chuck retired after serving as Dean of the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, and he knows more about teaching than just about anybody I know. He also sits in on my classes from time to time. “Can I tell you something?” Chuck asked. “When African American students in your class speak from their experience, you almost always follow up by explaining why you understand what they’re talking about.” Chuck’s words were hard to...