Stony Roads

Stony Roads has a New Home

2010-07-27T09:58:00.005-04:00

Stony Roads has moved.

Please continue the conversation with us at:

http://www.divinity.duke.edu/initiatives-centers/black-church-studies/stony-roads

The Last Words of Jesus: A Joint Reflection

2010-04-02T09:00:00.001-04:00

By Dr. Brian Bantum, Divinity '03
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

In Christ’s last words I am reminded of the observation of one theologian regarding Christ, that there are no words outside the Word... In reflecting upon these last words of Christ I am stopped. My speech ends for a moment as I begin to hear how my own words and my own hopes clang against Christ’s words spoken to me and about me, to humanity and about humanity. But rather than being driven to remain in silence, I am compelled to sing. To sing a song that is broken and out of tune even as I seek to sing with these words spoken to us, spoken about us. As I sing, in my tone-deaf desperation to hear the tune, I am left to humbly sing of this…

Only within Christ’s words of forgiveness (“forgive them…”) am I told what I do not know (…for they know not.)

Only within Christ’s words do I find the possibility of God’s presence, of a possibility fulfilled (…you will be with me.)

Only within Christ’s words do I find kinship, a kinship reordered and returned to me, a community gathered together at the foot of the cross (…behold your son, behold your mother.)

Only in Christ’s words do I find God taking my desolation and hopelessness into himself (…why have you forsaken me?)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my own thirst and do I discover the manifold ways I sought to quench my own thirst (I thirst)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my own completion (It is finished)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my end (To you I commit my spirit.)

These last words of Christ draw us not to the finality of a moment, but to the utter completeness of Christ’s words, of the presence of all of his words within these few words. In these brief utterances we find ourselves bound up together in his words concerning us, in his words for us, in his words within us. Let us receive the Word broken for us, the Word broken within us, that our words my sound within the manger of Christ’s body, declaring the depth of his love, the profundity and mystery of his life, God’s Word to us.

The Last Words of Jesus: GODFORSAKEN

2010-04-02T08:25:00.000-04:00

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (St. Matt. 27.45–46)

Jesus’ life was a becoming. It is constituted by which it was going, not by what was behind. Thus, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The life of Jesus was movement. It was ever pressing towards the moment spoken of in this, the first of Jesus’ sayings from the Cross. The moment of the Cross, and thus this saying from the Cross, was not superadded to Jesus’ identity. It was not some additional to who he was. No, not all. The Cross, the moment of Jesus’ death, is an expression of his identity as God with Us, his identity as Emmanuel (Isa. 7:14). He is the God, who in and as this man in solidarity with us, has stepped into the human condition, into our becoming. Again, “the Word became flesh.” And now from the Cross we have a new vantage point on our condition. It is one of Godforsakenness.

But what is Godforsakenness? Many a Christian thinker has tried to plumb its meaning. But perhaps more than anyone else, Harriet A. Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)—according to many literature scholars, this is the first female authored slave narrative—gives us some sense of what Godforsakenness means. Her experience of New World slavery and sexual exploitation through rape offers us something of a parable of Godforsakennes.

For 7 year, Jacobs was confined to a coffin-sized roof-top garret or attic to avoid the sexual advances of her master, Dr. Norcomb. Her only contact with the outside world was the sight afforded her through a loophole in the roof to still keep an eye on her children, still slaves themselves. This “loophole of retreat,” as Jacobs called her place of incarceration, was a place of abandonment, of Godforsakenness. Indeed, Jacobs invokes the scriptural language about Jesus’ own death and entombment to describe her situation.

I contend that Jacobs’ story of her experience as a slave girl, her experience of social death poised on the brink of actual death, gives us a window into the social processes, and thus is a parable, of “Godforsakenness.” It points to what Godforsakenness looks like on the ground, as the hidden reality of the everyday life of slaves. Godforsakenness is the situation of abject abandonment, the situation in which identity is constituted through hiddenness, invisibility, and death. Godforsakenness is to have one’s identity bounded on all sides by death. One ever stands on the precipice of death.

It is precisely this situation that God, as the man Jesus of Nazareth, entered into, for this is the condition that has befallen the creature in its will to be like the Creator. What we hear in this first word from the Cross is God having taken up this condition on our behalf.

We rejoice, however, that this is the not the last of Jesus’ words, and thus Godforsakeness, while being taken seriously, is not the final word, the final verdict on the human condition. There are yet six more words to be heard from the Cross. With these words we further hear of God’s entry in Jesus into our condition. God wills to see our condition through to the end, even unto death, and thereby drain our condition of the poison of death that has come to mark it. God wills to carve out a space of life in the tight spaces of death, in the spaces of Godforsakenness.

The Last Words of Jesus: AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

2010-04-02T08:20:00.004-04:00

By Dr. William C. Turner, Jr.

Associate Professor of the Practice of Homiletics

Duke Divinity School

The Sayings known as the "Seven Last Words" are recorded by the evangelists as words spoken from the cross in his passion. During the earthly ministry Jesus was moved with compassion toward the world. This is a world the Father has not abandoned. This is a world that God loves. The Son is not unmoved; rather, he is sent in the Spirit that creation might be restored to communion with God.

There is no scene that more clearly this passion, and there is no word that articulates it with more force than the "Cry of Dereliction," namely, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me." [Mark 15:34]

This scene is grasped in bold and glaring proportions by a member of Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, where I serve as pastor. She has depicted Jesus in that moment in a powerful portrait. The space on the canvas is accented by pushing the two brigands who hanged with him into the rear. Pushed forward is the figure of the Son. The face is scarred and disfigured by thorns, and it is not brought forth with the sort of clarity we expect from a camera shot. It is almost hidden in darkness. Drops of blood are shown coming from the face. At the foot of the cross one can see blood flowing from the nail scarred hands and feet and the pierced side.

Near the foot of the cross one sees the lamb with marks of slaughter upon it. Fissures are in the earth all around, and three women are kneeling in horror. No men are to be found. The clouds are shot through with streaks of lightning. At the same time they break with fragments from the gospel.

The fragment that gripped me with fresh force was from the charge made against him--that he is the "friend of taxcollectors and sinners." Was it for crimes that I had done that he groaned upon the tree? Did he die because he made himself my friend?

Surely this was a charge made against Jesus by his enemies. He was charged further with being a winebibber and a glutton. He was charged with blasphemy for saying he was the Son of God. In the words of the apostle, "he became a curse on the tree." He bore the reproach of creation, and in particular, the seed of Adam.

Forsakenness on the cross was the deepest dimension of death. Cut off from eternal communion, he bore our transgressions in his body. He was numbered with the transgressors. But in his passion he restored communion, bearing the weight and guilt of our sin, but also by returning in the Spirit to communion with the Father. In that return he carried friends with him.

We see mercies breaking forth from the clouds. It is for proclaimers of the gospel to tell this Good News to the world around us. In the midst of pain, suffering, disease, hurt, and oppression, the mercies of God continue to break in healing streams that flow from the wounded side. But in the broken body of the Lord, mercies stream to those who will receive them and are extended in the proclamation of this good word of life.

These mercies can be seen in acts of love for victims of natural and human disaster. We can see these streams of mercy in gestures of our republic to care for the sick, the helpless, and the dying. Despite the dark clouds and the dim days, the mercies continue to burst.

"Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, the clouds ye so much dread are big with mercies and shall break in blessings o'er your heads."

Let us pray for those who dare position themselves at the foot of the cross. Let us pray for those are chosen to bear the cross with Jesus, and those who for their love will not abandon him. Even while we pause to await the proclamation of the glorious triumph of the resurrection, let us not neglect to see the mercies of God that come to us from the identification of our savior with us on Calvary and the healing that comes from the cross.

The Last Words of Jesus: I THIRST

2010-04-02T08:15:00.001-04:00

By Dr. Esther Acolatse
Assistant Research Professor
of Pastoral Theology and Global Christianity
Duke Divinity School

Of all the words spoken on the cross that day, these words were the only ones that were related to the person of Jesus, as it were the only egocentric words. All others were exocentric, done in fulfillment of his calling as the son of Man who comes to take away the sin of human kind and fulfill his Father’s will. These are the last but one words from the cross of one who hung bruised and burned for the sins of others. It was as if at the lowest point in his life, abased to the lowest levels, his soul takes center stage and divinity bursts forth in him until the actual act of dying begin.

First he forgives directly the soldiers who mock, beat, and nailed his battered body to the cross, but then that forgiveness extends to all for whom this cruel at was necessitated, Jews and Gentiles alike.

Next he promises a dying penitent rest and peace and paradise. He had not broken faith with his Father despite the suffering, for this thief had heard him call God Father, when he asked God to forgive those who ill treated him.

He fulfils his filial duties by entrusting his mother to the disciple whom he loved the best. He gives his mother a son in place of the one that is being lost that day, for even on that cross he was still her little child. This is only the second time Jesus calls his mother woman- at his first miracle and at this his final miracle.

When he feels the weight of sin on himself through the severing of the bond from Abba, he is the obedient servant of the Lord, sensing the absence of fellowship and longing for the spiritual symbiotic relationship. But that rift was the signal that the work of grace was being done and he enters into his body rather than a spiritual plane to accomplish this act of dying so that it may count for us. He returns to his body and in this body he declares, “It is Finished” and commends his spirit to his God.

“I Thirst”, says the living water, the one who announces that all who thirst may come and drink freely of himself. My people say “Se kwatrikwa se obe kye wo ntuma, bisa ni din” when naked promises you cloth, ask for its name. With what shall we quench the thirst of water?

The human body is made up of sixty percent water, and about eight-three percent of our blood is water. He bore our sins in his body on the cross; his blood poured out depleted him of water. I THIRST, says the Lord, your savior. With what shall we quench his thirst?

May be we can join him in his thirst, at least in thirsting after righteousness, justice and peace this Easter season, but in our bodies, the place of our conscious acts, in our bodies, the place we share with others intimately or otherwise and in a way that translates into fullness of life for other bodies.

Health Spot: Healthcare Reform, Obesity and the Church

2010-03-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

By Dr. Richard Payne

Professor of Medicine and Divinity
Esther Colliflower Director, Duke ICEOL

By Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Here are a few thoughts from our resident physician on recent updates in the healthcare conversation. What do you think?

Given the recent passage of the health care bill, what would you hope to be the immediate benefit for people?

How might churches begin to address the issue of obesity, particularly in minority communities?

Thanks again to Dr. Payne for his time and consideration!! If you have a question for our regular Health Spot segment, please leave a comment in the section below or email us: stonyroads@div.duke.edu

The Real Blind Side

2010-03-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

By Dr. Willie James Jennings

Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies

Duke Divinity School

Growing up in Michigan, I learned to love football. There are few things as exhilarating as playing football in fresh snow, running, falling, and jumping with imaginations filled with images of becoming professional football players. My friends and I channeled the actions of our football heroes even if we lacked their actual skills. My best year of high school football was ninth-grade when I was a starting guard. I loved being a lineman, down in the mud and dirt where the real beauty of football is found. By the time I entered the tenth grade it was clear that I lacked the size to remain a guard. Such work was reserved for bodies that took up much more space on this earth. Yet my love of the game remains strong. Such love drew my attention to Michael Lewis’s book, The Blind Side. Thanks to the movie of the same name, the story of the book is now fairly well-known. It is the story of the black man child Michael Oher and the white family, the Tuohy family who made Michael their son.

I must admit watching the movie The Blind Side after watching the movie Precious is a jarring contrast. The actors in Precious were simply brilliant, but the sheer power of Precious is that it presses on anyone watching with eyes and ears attuned to its messages crucial questions about the way things are, especially for many black women. Precious brings the viewer deeply inside the horror and absurdity of her situation, an absurdity unabated by the few episodic fragments of the church in the movie. The failures and failings of people surround the character Precious and we along with Precious find it difficult to discern sources and sites of love for her. No such difficulty attends the movie The Blind Side. Love is front and center, love for black bodies located in love for a big black boy. But it is precisely this front-and-center-love that makes The Blind Side a complicated and problematic movie.

I liked The Blind Side. I want to say this clearly, because my experience is that people who have seen the movie and like the movie seem to be unusually defensive and quickly irritated with any suggestion of something amiss in this piece of art. But it is not difficult to imagine the source behind this hyper-sensitivity. As one woman said to me, “I know it’s a good movie, but I am tired of stories about white women saving black boys.” It is the dynamic of white paternalism - salvation in white hands - that generate a lot of tension and fuels thorny conversation and interpretations of this movie. But there are a deeper set of problems exposed by the movie. They are exposed by the movie because these are problems primarily of the social world that informs the artistic imagination displayed in this and other Hollywood products.

As with so many cinematic renderings, the movie is very different from the book. Michael Lewis is a beautiful writer and his text, The Blind Side, is quite elegant. He offers what amounts to a secular form of predestination within the world of professional sports, especially football. Factors beyond the knowledge or control of Michael Oher or the Tuohy family are moving them toward each other. Contingency, individual agency, and choice are always present but you sense larger realities at work all around the central people of the story. The book brings the reader into an evolutionary and capitalist tale of football. The emergence of a new more powerful black athlete on defense created the need for offenses to adapt. That the new more powerful athlete is black is both beside the point and the point. That new athlete was Lawrence Taylor and the new situation was his ability through speed and strength to get to the quarterback’s body and bring him down or do him harm.

The central adaptation to this new situation was the emergence of more powerful athletes on offense who could protect the quarterback’s blindside, that is, the left side for right-handed quarterbacks. The new athlete would be unusually big, unusually quick and nimble, and very strong. He would be a left tackle and he would become one of the highest paid players on any football team. As Lewis shows us the mind of the market we come to see how money follows demand. We also come to see thanks to Lewis’ wonderful portrait how offensive schemes come to rely profoundly on the strength of the left tackle. He is the foundation on which offenses stand or fall. Of course, football remains a team sport but the real contest of strength, skill, and will begins with this crucial lineman and the defensive end assigned to disrupt the offense.

It is both brilliant and strange to insert the lives of real people into the drama of this game, but Lewis has actually found an ingenious way to present the American story of race in a way that keeps us from looking away from the familiar. Lewis lifts up the single life of Michael Oher and pulls forward a web of relations that shape not only this young man’s life but also American life. Michael is the neglected child of a single mother who is an addict and trapped in poverty. He then draws us into the Tuohy’s family life – wealthy, Christian, and conservative -- in ways that honor their humanity and vulnerability, but there is something quite ominous working in Lewis’s account. It has to do with black bodies. Anyone who understands the deep architecture of modern western slavery can sense the problem that dogs this book. The story is sandwiched between the body of Lawrence Taylor and the body of Michael Oher.

Fundamentally, black bodies have been about utility. Other bodies have also been about utility, but black bodies mark the way, reveal this modality of use-value. Professional sports hide this history of use-value right out in the open. The problem here is that Lewis humanizes this history, domesticates further an already demonically domesticated order of things. The line of thought is simple: sport gives a way out for poor white folks, for black folks, for young black men, thug and non-thug. Lewis adds complexity to that simple line: But college sport (bound to pre-college preparation) gives a way in, into society, into middle or upper class existence, into civilization, into hope. Trapped inside that industrial strength logic is the fragile reality of the Oher-Tuohy story, they fell in love. Leigh Anne and Sean, Sean Jr. and Collins and Michael came to love each other. Their love must find a way in the midst of the slavery haunted, capitalist driven reality of black men in sports. In truth sport is not an answer. It performs the problem.

The problem it performs is to squeeze love inside utility. It presses our imaginations to bind the possibilities of white people loving black people to the performances of black flesh: athletic, artistic, or minstrel. And it suggests the central mode of relation to be quintessentially paternal. This is the American imagination at work. Thankfully, people have and some people do break open this restrictive imagination and walk in greater realities of love and belonging. I would like to think that the Tuohys are an example of this and that their Christian faith is what made this possible. But the Christianity presented in both book and movie reflects Christianity’s problems in America. It is a Christianity bound in segregation and weak in how it imagines its world, which brings me to the problems of the movie.

The movie is certainly not the book. The movie does give us through the wonderful acting of Sandra Bullock a vision of a mother’s heart expansive enough to love a child not her own to such an extent to make him her own. The Tuohy family extend themselves in ways that gesture the central logic of the gospel, life offered in weakness and love for the sheer sake of love. But black people come off in this movie as the frontier of risk, the boundary and boarder of danger, the line that one must have absolute courage to cross. That is, black people come off as a site of an almost impossible reach of love. The movie makes nothing of the risk that brought Michael into the white community, the white school, the white world. More importantly, the movie plays in the sick logic of black exceptionalism. In the movie, Michael is kind, gentle, teachable, and protective of white flesh. He is just the opposite of the vast majority of the other black men depicted in the movie. In one sad scene, Sandra Bullock’s character faces down a drug dealer in the black community who has threatened Michael. She touches her purse and says in effect I will kill you if you try to hurt me or my family. Michael is now in her circle of protective fear. Such a scene is not in the book or in the real history of Michael with the Tuohy family, but it is in the real fears of so many people.

There is another sense of exceptionalism that is equally tragic. The effort of the Tuohy family, especially Leigh Anne, is also an exception for the white Christian community of Memphis. The movie captures the abnormality of this love as an abnormality even within Christianity itself. This kind of love is not what Christians do. It is what this particular family did. What if this kind of love, this kind of claiming was the norm for Christian existence? What if what it meant to be Christian in all the specific locations where Christians live was to be people who created places that bridge racial, social, and geographic divides? What would happen if a Christian education was indeed shaped by a scandalous joining of very different peoples who love each other and this love constitutes the very ecology of an educational experience? My questions reach for what does not exist but which we can catch glimpses of even in this flawed movie. The more decisive question in this regard is, however, will Christians here and elsewhere begin to grasp the deeper demands of community and communion implied by the faith we confess. The real question is whether we will ever begin to see our real blindside?

A Sense of History

2010-03-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

By Dr. Mary McClintock Fulkerson
Professor of Theology
Duke Divinity School

As a member of the Pauli Murray Steering Committee and participant in a Pauli Murray reading group at Asbury Temple UMC, I am having my own sense of history turned upside down. By “sense of history” I mean my family history to be sure, but also my larger conception of U.S. history and church history. The recounting of Pauli Murray’s family history in Proud Shoes is a complex and riveting story of the personal and everyday as well as institutional realities of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, and the class and “color” fissures that continue in Durham, Chapel Hill and northeastern areas where her ancestors were located. But, of course, it’s not the “official” history of these matters; it is the story of how a white woman married to a slaveholder in Chapel Hill brings up four daughter who are the result of her sons’ rape of women slaves; or the mixed and complicated loyalties of descendents of such rapes; the real and complicated humanity of persons, black, mulatto and white who have to bear the burden of grotesque social sin even as they live out face-to-face, day-to-day interactions with their ‘enemies’ who are also their caretakers and blood kin. These white ancestors are displayed in their vicious racist dehumanizing behavior toward persons of color, their sporadic kindness and humanity, and their total obliviousness to dehumanizing objectification of black bodies entailed by their lives.

What is riveting for me about these “history” lesssons is not just learning about life on the “other side of the tracks” in segregated southern towns very similar to my own family’s life in Arkansas, Texas and North Carolina. I do know something about the embarrassing history of our country, which even today continues to claim to be “colorblind,” and to have moved beyond racism. What is riveting is sharing stories with African Americans my age and younger and hearing what it was like to be told by your parents how to protect yourself from people like me and my family. While I “know” about and acknowledge racism---have written about white obliviousness to racism---having its complexities personalized in ongoing conversations is a deeply rich and painful experience.

I continue to think about the sacrament of communion in relation to this storytelling. Womanist theologian Shawn Copeland has described the character of Jesus’ call to the table in a most compelling way. Her account of Eucharist resonates profoundly with the dynamics of our shared memories, but also invokes a logic that might create a new consciousness. The Eucharist is to create an alternate imagination, as Copeland says, an imagination shaped by the “dangerous memory” of Jesus’ suffering, crucifixion, death and resurrection. An alternate imagination, then, cannot be a ‘gathering’ that simply repeats the biblical/theological ritual, failing to surface, acknowledge and attend to such contemporary realities as the continued realities of racism and the exploited, devalued, despised black body. To remember can be a kind of museum activity --- lets us white folks just admire the biblical past; never mind about remembering in order to honestly face and name the present. Faithful Christian memory, then, should do what reading Pauli Murray’s history is doing--- namely, surface our racialized history in all its complexity. It should also open us to move beyond awareness and pity, the sometimes superficial “community” of table fellowship…to enter the deep water of grace that entails lived, honest, and risky connecting.

Health Spot: Thinking About Healthcare

2010-02-15T08:00:00.000-05:00

By Dr. Richard Payne

Professor of Medicine and Divinity

Esther Colliflower Director, Duke ICEOL

By Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

We continue the conversation with our own Dr. Richard Payne, regarding the ongoing healthcare debate. Some of the details of where we stand now have changed since the taping of this short, but the implications for coverage are critical as we think through another attempt to reform healthcare in our country. See Parts I and II below.

Events: Triumph & Truth

2010-02-03T09:00:00.003-05:00

Dr. Joy J. Moore

Associate Dean for Black Church Studies and Church Relations
Duke Divinity School

Triumph & Truth
http://www.divinity.duke.edu/studentlife/bsu/triumph

Celebrating 40 Years of the Black Seminarians Union
at Duke Divinity School

Feb. 8-10, 2010
Duke Divinity School

Duke Divinity School’s Office of Black Church Studies invites alumni, students, and the Duke University and Durham communities in celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the founding of the Black Seminarians Union (BSU) and its mission.

Hear students’ testimonies of truth and the triumphs that led to the establishment of BSU andthe Office of Black Church Studies.

The Feb. 8-10, 2010 celebration will include presentations and preaching by Dr. Cynthia Hale D’79, founding pastor of the 5,100-member Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Ga.,

and Gregory Palmer D’79, resident bishop of the Illinois Episcopal Area (Illinois Great Rivers Annual Conference) of the United Methodist Church. Palmer also is president of the worldwide council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church.

Schedule of Events

Monday, Feb. 8, 2010

7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church (316 Hebron Road, Durham, N.C.)
Worship Service. The 40th-anniversary celebration of the Black Seminarians Union will kick off with a worship service and communion led by Dr. William Turner, Jr. and a sermon by Bishop Elroy Lewis.

Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010

10:15 a.m.
Westbrook Building, Duke Divinity School, upper lobby
Event Registration

11:25 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Goodson Chapel, Duke Divinity School
Worship service with keynote speaker Bishop Gregory Palmer preaching and The Gospel Choir of Duke Divinity School performing.

2:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Westbrook Building, Room 0014, Duke Divinity School
Panel discussion on “Triumph and Truth: Looking Back, Moving Forward,” with Dr. Clarence G. Newsome, Dr. William Turner, Jr., Dr. Cynthia Hale, and Bishop Gregory Palmer.

5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Alumni Memorial Common Room, Langford Building, Room 152, Duke Divinity School
“Jazz & Joy – Jazz and the Spoken Word” Open Reception featuring jazz and reflections on theology and music today. Dr. Cynthia Hale will sing. Heavy hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be served.

Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2010

11:25 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Goodson Chapel, Duke Divinity School
Worship service with Dr. Cynthia Hale preaching.

12:30 – 2:30 p.m.
Westbrook Building, Room 0016, Duke Divinity School
Luncheon with panel discussion on “Parish Ministry: Where Do We Go from Here?” featuring Dr. Cynthia Hale, Bishop Gregory Palmer and Duke Divinity School faculty.

Health Spot: New Year, New You?

2010-02-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

By Dr. Richard Payne

Professor of Medicine and Divinity

Esther Colliflower Director, Duke ICEOL

By Dr. Willie James Jennings

Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies

Duke Divinity School

Are your New Year's Resolutions to be healthier already little more than a memory? Dr. Richard Payne checks in with us about how to sustain the course by valuing moderation over anything else, and committing to realistic lifestyle changes. Watch the video below for more reflections.

People with self-control manage their health. That way they can accomplish more and enjoy their achievements. 'Learn to appreciate and give dignity to your body.'

1Thessalonians 4:4 MSG

Why, Lord? Haiti and the God-Question

2010-01-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Last Tuesday a magnitude 7 earthquake, the same strength quake that rocked San Francisco in 1989, brought the little island nation of Haiti to its knees. It has been reported by some news outlets that nearly one-third of the nation’s population, or somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3 million people, have been affected either by being killed or personally injured or maimed or by being left homeless. It is not an exaggeration to say that the devastation strains one’s abilities to describe.

And it is just this inability to fully capture and conceptualize the devastation that usually presses us, both individually and as a society, to turn to what I call the “God-and-suffering” or theodicy question. Why Lord? Where is God in this? Why has God allowed this? These are all versions of the God-and-suffering question.

Now let me say directly and without equivocation: I don’t like these questions and you shouldn’t either.

I don’t say this to dismiss out of hand the lived reality of pain and suffering that the Haitian people are enduring. Far, far be it from me to do that! And I don’t say it to dismiss the God-question or the question of God-and-suffering. I’m a theologian, so far be it from me to do that either!

Quite the contrary; I don’t like these questions precisely because of how seriously I want to take the lived reality of pain and suffering that the Haitian people are enduring now, and precisely because of how seriously the God-question and the God-and-suffering question must be taken.

Let me explain why I say these are bad questions and that we must let them go.

The problem here is not with the God-and-suffering or the theodicy question as such. It is with the way the question is often posed and taken up, and in its deepest presupposition.

First, a consideration of how it is often posed and taken up in the public imagination:

Often the way the God-and-suffering question is posed prevents us from asking other important social, cultural and political questions. These other questions are those of how the painful effects of natural disaster (such as the earthquake in Haiti) are often made worse due to certain social, cultural and political factors. I don’t mean social factors just within Haiti itself: I mean how Haiti has come to be positioned internationally among the community of nations. This positioning has both a long and a short horizon. The long horizon partly goes back to the slave rebellion against the French that is at the origin of the Haitian nation. The key date here is 22 August 1791, the date that began the Haitian revolution, when a people of African descent became the second people of the New World to resist Old World, European rule. (The first was The United States of America in 1776).

But Haiti’s longer term history goes back further still to 5 December 1492 when Christopher Columbus happened upon this island, claiming it as a colony of Spain. Not too long afterwards African slaves were brought to the island to work the land for the enrichment of European interests.

The shorter horizon of Haitian history is the complex relationship between Haiti and the United States throughout the 20^th century, which at one point saw the United States as late as 1947 retaining control of Haitian finances and thus exercising significant control in the country.

This complex and complicated long and short term history has left an indelible mark on the social realities of Haiti. It’s sovereignty as a country was not only troubled from within. It has also been troubled by interventions from other Western powers. These social and political realities, realities both internal to Haiti and external to it, have seriously marked Haiti as a country and its ability, for example, to create the kinds of infrastructure it has needed to thrive. However, the country was making significant progress, economically and politically, of late. Much of its recent progress has been thrown in jeopardy by this devastating earthquake.

Often the way the theodicy question is raised and answered, social factors such as these go unremarked and uninterpreted.

Let’s take as an example of what I’m talking about, the ridiculous (I know no other adjective for it) remarks of Pat Robertson, a Christian evangelical leader and main voice of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club,” about Haiti.

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti,” Robertson said, “and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal.”

Robertson went on to say that “ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.” The implication here seems to be that if Haiti had not left French colonial tutelage (with assistance and support from the devil), the country would not be in its present straits. This is an interesting, if not troubling, revision of history built into Robertson’s remarks, for in them he implicitly celebrates the colonial era as one that was pre-Satanic and thus one of supposed Christian (?) bliss for Haiti, with the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period being one of chaos and devastation. Even the New York Times conservative writer David Brooks, much more circumspect to be sure than Robertson, opined last Friday that the restoration of a kind of colonial rule over Haiti by the international community might be what’s needed to bring Haiti back from this devastation and to ensure that its “corruption” and “poverty,” its chaos (my term, not Brooks’s), is held in check.

But to go back to Robertson, his remarks didn’t stop with Haiti’s so-called “deal with the devil.” In other remarks on the Christian Broadcasting Network, he went on to speak of the earthquake as “a blessing in disguise” for Haiti insofar as with so many buildings now leveled, the country will basically have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Moreover, there is the “blessing” as Robertson sees it that the nation might turn from the devil, from voo-doo and such, to God.

There is much else that I could comment upon about Robertson’s asinine remarks. But I won’t, for what I want to stress is the theodicy question and the answer he poses to it inside of his comments. I want to stress how the theodicy question and its answer operates or functions for him as an interpretive grid in this situation. His answer to the theodicy or the God-and-suffering question is an one that actually turns from the anguish of Haitian suffering. Looking away from that suffering, he positions himself as one who stands, metaphysically as it were, above fray of the corpses strewn throughout the streets of Port-au-Prince, above the fray of the mass graves on hillsides and under flattened buildings, above the fray of the cries of agony and the moans of grief coming from the living. Robertson’s is a theodical answer, one that judges the Haitian people in order to justify God or show God to be right in unleashing this devastation, or if not unleashing it, allowing it. This is his justification of God, which in reality is not a justification of God at all. It’s a justification of Robertson and more crucially the vision of the world his comments presuppose.

But sadly, the Robertson posture and approach here is not new.

We saw a version of it in 2005 when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. At that time, some said that the city was devastated because of religious and sexual licentiousness—“voo-doo and homosexuality are rampant,” some said. God therefore is just in allowing Katrina; those of New Orleans made their own version of a “pact with the devil.”

But what do we see here? The theodicy question was posed in such a way as to abdicate responsibility, to mute social consciousness. Theodicy became a way of rising above or to be disincarnate from (rather than incarnate with) the lived realities of bloated bodies in the streets, hungry persons in the Superdome, and trapped people on roofs and housetops. It was a way of asking the God-and-suffering question so as to never find a way to ask what it meant that race and class distinctions—that is, if you were poor and non-white—more than anything else determined if you were stuck in New Orleans and weeping for help.

But a year before that we saw another version of the poorly framed theodicy question in 2004. This was when a massive tsunami, an ocean earthquake, struck the Asian rim of the Indian Ocean and the coast of Somalia on the second day of Christmas leaving tens of thousand dead. At that time there again were those who raised the theodicy question in such a way as to stand metaphysically above the fray of the devastation of strewn corpses along the beaches. Stepping over the bodies, so to speak, they said that all we can do is “hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms . . . ,” to quote the remarks of one eminent theologian as he put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and then later in a book that took the tsuanmi as the occasion for its reflections on theodicy or God, suffering and evil. What was reflected upon neither in the op-ed nor in the book were the social conditions that could make a tsunami off the coast of the Asian rim more lethal than a similar tsunami off the coast, say, of California.

Put differently, what I am pointing to is the centrality of the social question along with the anthropological question framed in such a way as to doubt the humanity of certain persons (“they made a pact with the devil”; they are sexually licentious, etc.) for the theological and religious question of God, suffering, and evil. Perhaps the social and anthropological question are the real issues at the heart of the religious and theological question of suffering. But it is precisely these issues that poorly framed theodicy questions makes us blind to.

And so, just as we’ve been unable as a society to ask social questions in relationship to suffering and the tsunami of 2004 and in relationship to suffering and hurricane Katrina in 2005, so too we are proving unable to ask social questions as part of the theodicy question in relationship to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

But perhaps the real problem in what I have described to this point in this piece lies deeper still. Perhaps tragedies such as the earthquake in Haiti (and Katrina and tsunami in the first decade of the 21^st century) reveal a deeper failure. This is the failure, if not the collapse, of a Christian imagination, indeed, of a Christian social imagination committed to and lodged within the incarnation of God in the flesh. For at the heart of the badly posed God-and-suffering question, on the part of Christians especially, is the refusal of the incarnation of God in the flesh and further still the inability to think inside of the incarnation.

For in Jesus, so we confess, God was manifest, not metaphysically above the fray, but in the flesh, in our condition (1 Tim. 3:16). In Jesus, pain and suffering are taken up into God’s identity. This suffering includes the realities of physical and social death, along with the conditions that perpetuate death and suffering. In the person of Jesus, these realities have been decisively dealt with not by a God who is above the fray but by one who is named Immanuel, God with Us, one who walks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead by the Spirit of God points to that form of life within and ultimately beyond the conditions of death. Jesus’ resurrection, which we live into by the Holy Spirit, empowers us now to work within tight spaces—the tight space confronting the world community now is the trauma of the Haitian earthquake—to bring life from death.

If I have called for a moratorium on the bad theodicy question, I’m also calling for a new kind of theodical engagement with the world—beginning right now, with Haiti—rooted in the incarnation of God in the flesh and in his resurrection from the dead.

Praying for Haiti

2010-01-14T08:00:00.001-05:00

(A shy Haitian playmate of photographer Amey Victoria Adkins, Summer 2006)

God of the living and the dead,
we wail in grief at the pain and loss and horror and distress
of our brothers and sisters in Haiti.
We do not understand your ways –
that those who already suffer the most,
now suffer so much more.
Lead us to repentance,
that we who have sinned so much are punished so little,
and they who already struggle have now impossible burdens to bear.
Where people are still breathing under collapsed buildings,
give them air and hope and courageous searchers.
Where children are injured or orphaned,
find them trusted friends and generous caregivers.
Where despair is infectious and disease or looting spreads,
bring patience and forbearance and healing and strength to conquer temptation.
And when others look with compassion from afar,
release resources, empower expertise, shape political will,
and bring deliverance for your people in their distress.
Through him who was crushed and bruised for us,
in the comfort of your Holy Spirit. Amen.

– Prayer for Haiti by Sam Wells, Dean of Duke Chapel

Stony Roads

2010-01-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

As we welcome you, our readers, and all of our students back for another season, we can't help but be filled with excitement at all 2010 has in store!! There are many changes we anticipate, including some site amendments and some new conversation partners. We're also looking forward to celebrating with you events in the Duke and Durham communities, as the Spring is filled with much to reflect over culturally and spiritually.

As such, we guide you here to the MLK, Jr. Day Events that will be held on our campus: http://mlk.duke.edu

We also announce that we will be opening our call for submissions later in the Spring, and we are very excited to expand our virtual community here in that way!

Lastly, as we enter each day with newness, we take a moment to recall from whence we have come, and the faithfulness of a God who has brought us thus far. We leave you with the lyrics to the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, and ask that you meditate closely on their meaning in ways we might overlook when singing from memory. And, we thank you, for traveling the Stony Roads that have brought us thus far, but will continue to lead our paths to the places of promise and hope where we venture.

With grace and peace,

Black Church Studies

Lift Every Voice and sing till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of liberty
Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea

Sing a song, full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song, full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sum of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod
felt in the days when hope unborn had died
yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come, over a way that which tears has been watered
We have come, treading out path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out of the gloomy past, till now we stand at last,
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast!

GOD of our weary years, GOD of our silent tears
Thou Who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light
Keep us for-e-ver in the path we pray!

Lest our feet, stray from the places our GOD where me met thee
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand
True to our God, True to our native land!

21st Century Courage

2010-01-04T08:00:00.007-05:00

By Dr. William C. Turner, Jr.

Associate Professor of the Practice of Homiletics

Duke Divinity School

***We offer in this New Year excerpts from Dr. Turner's sermon "21st Century Courage." May God bless each of you in this season!***

21st Century Courage. What are some challenges in the search? Are new lies being told to the present generation, or have the old ones been ensconced in the way the world is configured? In short, what is the courage required to live authentic existence?

What shall be the source of courage when there is no evidence of a payoff? What shall be the enduring legacy? How will a generation be remembered? What is Intrinsic Good? In a day when there is no failsafe promise of becoming rich, wealthy, or famous, what are the Intrinsic Values to be embraced?

One of the most courageous moves for the current generation would be what I call abandonment of dinosaur logic. I take this expression from Brazilian theologian Reubem Alves in his book entitled Tomorrow’s Child. He made the interesting comment, which I shall ever remember, concerning why the dinosaur became extinct. The dinosaur, he said, did not die out for being small, weak, or powerless. Just the opposite was the case. The problem was that the dinosaur knew only how to get larger. As he grew in size he consumed all that was necessary for being sustained. Once he had decimated his environment, the dinosaur had nothing left on which to feed, and he left no legacy but fossils. A generation with courage will take heed. Look instead for ways to open doors and make opportunities for others. Who, for instance, will “make work” for a generation that for all practical purposes is useless?

It was a hard sounding word when he said it, but Bill Cosby is right. There is a generation around us that could not qualify for slavery. Now you don’t get the full weight of such a comment without knowing your history. The truth is that in large measure slavery was productive in the South due to the skills—not just the labor--of the African slaves. South Carolina became filthy rich because slaves had technical knowledge of how to grow rice for the world market. A slave invented the machine for removing the seed from cotton—a credit that went to Eli Whitney.

Visit old plantation homes and you will see ornate artistry in wood, brick, and iron that is the handiwork of slaves. The engine that drove the economy of the Antebellum South came not only from the brawn, but also from the brain of slaves. Until well into the Civil Rights Era it was not uncommon to find black men who were geniuses with their hands. They could make or repair anything. I grew up around men who could listen to an engine and tell what the trouble was. My father could do anything with his hands. If he and others like him only had the opportunity and financial backing they would have been wealthy, or they would have raised others with them. This is indeed the legacy of those who used their knowledge for uplift and financial enterprises.

In some serious ways 21st century courage is like the courage of previous generations, but perhaps with exception. It must look into the apocalyptic cup of abominations and be chastened by the consequences of consorting with the beast. It takes courage to imagine a future that offers more than poverty, and hopelessness when this is the order of the day. But such courage is needed.

Accept the fact that this is not the pioneer generation. There is no longer a disposition of pity within the nation. Nobody accepts blame or feels guilt for the poor, or the left behind. The fund of guilt has been exhausted, if ever that were a sufficient reservoir for progress. It takes courage to look for new career paths, to make work for self and others, to reach back for someone needing a hand. This is a good day to revalorize our view of serving professions, to learn again how to live from the land, and to look toward a future that is clean and green.

As a Christian preacher and theologian I look to Jesus, who heads a procession of heroes in courage. The writer of Hebrews positioned himself as something of a Marshall making a Roll Call. Judging from who is admitted into the line up, I would dare to anticipate some further admissions. There are some in the list any bible reader might expect. But other unexpected ones also are included for the tremendous courage they displayed. Reaching backward he included Rahab and Jeptha along with Sarah and Abraham. It seems that moving forward the line-up might include Ghandi, King, Mandela, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer and other lesser known souls who found courage.

So strive with your last ounce of courage. This is your century!

Michelle Obama and the Black Madonna

2009-12-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

By Dr. Willie James Jennings

Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies

Duke Divinity School

The Obama family makes history every day in this country. The most recent historical event that caught my attention was the annual public presentation of the White House at Christmas. Usually Barbara Walters or some such news celebrity visits the American royal castle with camera team in tow in order to give us a guided tour. Greeting us at the door and walking us through that starry space is normally the job of the first lady. But this year it was a different first lady and a different television celebrity. This year, Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama guided us through the White House at Christmas.

As I watched and listened to them I had such dissonance with the entire event. Here were two black women engaged in one of the most profound acts of representation, vicarious representation for the American public – presenting the White House, the house of America’s people in one of its most celebrated and intimate seasons. When Oprah and the first lady stood in front of that magnificent North Carolina Christmas tree with Michelle Obama pointing out the ornaments that came from all fifty states, I realized that Mrs. Obama was performing something breathtakingly new but also strangely familiar. She was giving witness (testimony really) to the collective reality of the America people. With every object, ornament, flower or picture she drew attention to and explained, she spoke for the many. Such speaking had always been done from that space by a white woman, but here she and Oprah Winfrey carried on a conversation with us and for us.

It is clear to me as it is with many people that as important as Barack Obama’s presidency is, Michelle Obama’s powerful presence is equally important. It is an importance beyond the operations of statecraft or that of celebrity influence, even beyond that of being the Most Fascinating Person of 2009. She now lives in a space that she is making a new kind of space, a space many different people can now imagine themselves inhabiting, imagining themselves a part of, imagining themselves considered from inside it, never forgotten. But what is strangely familiar about Michelle in the White House, her house, on Christmas is that it gestures so much like Mary the Mother of Jesus. I want to be clear here: Christmas is really about Mary and Jesus. Once you realize this, then the analogies with the scenes I am describing become overwhelming.

Mary was the unlikely one to gave witness to God in flesh. This poor young woman was the embodiment of dissonance. She carried a truth that no one would have believed in any normal circumstance. Yet here she was the bearer of God. Mary, the one most people (then and now) would believe that God was most unlike, was in fact, the very one the Son of God choose to be like. Jesus would be like his mother, obedient, willing, and loving. This is one of the reasons why so many people, especially those who are poor, get Mary. Whether Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, high church, low church, no church, they understand someone who creates a space that is safe, secure, warm, and inviting, a space that differs from a vision of a God strange, remote, perfect, demanding. I am not commending the contrast. I am only registering its on going effect.

More importantly, the images of Mary in their variety carry almost as much significance as the images of Jesus. My favorite is the one that adorns our blog. This portrait of the Black Madonna rendered by the brilliant artist Margaret Parker says so much. Not only is it beautiful but it brings so much to us.

She looks out at us with such determination, her head partly covered but exposing the beauty of her hair. Her arm and hands are clearly quite strong and her hip is positioned out just enough to support holding baby Jesus. And Jesus is at that age where he is old enough to walk and able to get into trouble or danger. So she grips him with the care and commitment of a mother protecting her child. What is also brilliant about this portrait is the space of darkness, of blackness, of the unknown. Beside Mary and Jesus is an emptiness that opens to an uncertain future. We know that future, but they do not. Yet Mary will be Jesus’ mother. She will work for him, live for him, be present for him.

This is the stage on which God will be known. God will come from a poor woman who knows what dangers and troubles may await her child and who will position her own body between that future and her baby’s life. Before Jesus will do the same positioning of his own body next to the world’s troubles, he will have the memories of his mother’s gestures on which to build. We must never forget that God choose Mary to stand in this space for the sake of God’s Son and for our sake. It is precisely this truth that presses into my mind when I listened and watched Michelle Obama gesturing in the White House at Christmas time.

So many people are facing uncertain futures right now. The mental health of many hangs in the balance, suspended between job losses, unmanageable mortgage payments, and shredding health care benefits. Mrs. Obama seems to realize that the weight of representation increases as people with dimming hopes look for beacons of light. And a large beautifully lit Christmas tree burning brightly in a familiar place is an obvious candidate for a first glance. So if you happen to see the White House Christmas tree and the first lady pointing toward it, then I invite you to look beyond that tree to another wonderful woman who faced an uncertain future and with faith in God offered to us of her own flesh, the Son of God.

Mary, Did You Know?

2009-12-24T20:00:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas from Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School! This year has been one filled with triumphs and challenges, both of which have been opportunities to press us all the more deeply inside of our realities, along with Mary, as bearers of God in the world. As a gift to you, we share one of our favorite songs of the season from a rendition of Langston Hughes gospel play Black Nativity, performed by Trinity Entertainment Group: Mary, Did You Know?

Peace and Blessings until we greet again in the New Year!!

Sincerely,

Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School

Lyrics:

Mary, did you know
That your baby boy will one day walk on water?
Did you know
That your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?
Did you know
That your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child that you've delivered
Will soon deliver you

Mary, did you know
That your baby boy will give sight to a blind man?
Did you know
That your baby boy will calm a storm with His hand?
Did you know
That your baby boy has walked where angels trod?
And when you kiss your little boy
You've kissed the face of God

Mary, did you know?
The blind will see
The deaf will hear
And the dead will live again
The lame will leap
The dumb will speak
The praises of the Lamb

Mary, did you know
That your baby boy is Lord of all creation?
Did you know
That your baby boy will one day rules the nations?
Did you know
That your baby boy is heaven's perfect Lamb?
This sleeping child you're holding
Is the Great I Am

A Black Princess

2009-12-21T08:00:00.003-05:00

R. Kamille Williams, D'09

Co-Founder and Project Director

El Salvador Palliative Care

I went to see Disney’s The Princess and the Frog opening weekend and started crying as soon as I stepped into the cinema lobby--a reaction that caught me off-guard. My heart was filled with joy when I saw so many beautiful black princesses proudly wearing their tiaras in anticipation of seeing Disney’s first portrayal of a black princess. A new day had come, and this was certainly good news!

Given my own childhood, when the only black characters in Disney films, noted by unique accents and cultural assumptions, were portrayed as animals--Simba, Nala, Mufasa and Rafiki in The Lion King, the crows in Dumbo, or the crab Sebastian in The Little Mermaid--The Princess and the Frog is truly a remarkable moment. My own emotional response to the movie is traced by the historical reality of negative depictions of black women. From the exotic beastly savage, mammy or simpleton, to the one who is inherently angry, lascivious, a dominatrix, seductress or bad mother, just to name a few. But if these continue to be the predominant images of black women that are being displayed, what does this do to the self-esteem of little black girls?

With Princess Tiana, we see a different depiction of Black women. She is from a loving, two-parent, working-class home, is ambitious, independent and characterized as strong and resilient, even when she too has to combat issues of class and social standing. She has brown skin, and she is beautiful. Acknowledging her presence on-screen acknowledges her presence in little girls, and in the lives of women in real world. Acknowledging her presses us into something bigger than ourselves.

In The Princess and the Frog Disney went back to the old fairytale formula of wishing upon stars, magical spells, killing off a parent, good overcoming evil, and dreams coming true in the end. However, I want to invite us to look at Princess Tiana’s story through a different lens. During this advent season, I am reminded of how Jesus’ own humble beginnings enabled him to sympathize with the marginalized of the world, thus enabling us to see those that are most often ignored or stepped over. Jesus acknowledged these people. Jesus saw them.

In the beginning of the movie, Tiana wishes upon a star for her dream of opening a restaurant to come true. This was her prayer. After finally saving enough money for the down payment on the space where she desired to start her business, she lifts up a song with the lyrics “I’m almost there.” Sadly, she is outbid and ends up losing all of the money she has worked for years to save, dismissed by the realtors because of her social class. A serious of events follows wherein she is turned into a frog, and forced to face great peril to fight for her dream.

Tiana’s singing these words reminded me of the woman with the issue of blood in Luke 8. For twelve years she had been ignored and disregarded due to her medical condition. She spent all of her money on physicians who did not help her. Yet, when she heard that Jesus was coming through she came out of her isolation and pressed her way through the throngs knowing that he would be the source of her healing. Because of her status as being unclean, it took incredible courage to enter the crowd gathered around Jesus. By touching other people, alone, she was violating the laws of purity (Leviticus 15: 25-28). And to make matters worse, she had the audacity to touch a holy man! I imagine while pressing her way to Jesus, she must have been stepped on and shoved around. But I believe she told herself, “I’ve got to keep going! I’m almost there!”

When she finally reaches her goal, Jesus asks who touched him. She had to have been terrified and was probably wondering how in the world this man had felt her touch out of all of these people. But there was something different in her touch. It was a touch of faith. That is why Jesus acknowledged her! This woman had nothing to lose but everything to gain. The scripture does not tell us this woman’s name, however when Jesus acknowledges her he refers to her as “daughter,” recognizing her as the child of God and rightful heiress of Abraham that she is. Jesus saw her and acknowledged her humanity! She pressed her way to Jesus and got that which she had come for and so much more. Just as Tiana, after having lost everything, pressed her way through the Louisiana swamps as a frog and ended up gaining more than she bargained for. She regained her humanity and became royalty!

Jesus makes the invisible visible. Jesus was the one that acknowledged all people as the children of God that they are. Though fictional characters, we must acknowledge the Precious’ and Tiana’s of the world as daughters of Abraham that have been created in the image of God. This Advent season, let us not forget about the marginalized of society. Let us not forget about the 17 million women ages 15-49 that are living with HIV/AIDS, those who are suffering from domestic violence, the 500,000 – 2 million women and children that are being sexually trafficked, and the people that have been non-combatant casualties of war. Let us not forget about all people in the margins of the world. Let us take time to not only see them, but acknowledge and embrace them so that we may truly be participants in Jesus’ ministry.

Anticipation: A Hope For The Present

2009-12-14T08:00:00.003-05:00

By Gail Song Bantum, D'09
Worship Leader and Speaker
Seattle, Washington

As the song goes, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year…it’s the hap - happiest season of all!” but is it? For some, it may be a dreaded and amplified season of a growing to do list. For others, it may be a burden, be it financial, familial, and/or social. And yet for others, it may just be a relief that the year is almost over in hopes of a better one to come.

However, as we continue in the season of Advent, we are reminded of an anticipation that calls forth rejoicing--rejoicing in the knowledge that this Christ we wait for is indeed coming. So often, we spend much of our time anticipating this or that that we fail to live into the present moments. We are constantly consumed by the to do’s that we do not know what it means to be. We are so focused on what is to come that we lose sight of what is. What is, is the reality that Christ has already come, has come as us and for us. For Christians, Advent is a season of anticipation that allows us to fully live into the already. It is not a hope that is marked by angst or uncertainty. Rather, I like to think that we are invited to participate more as midwives than visitors in the birth of our Christ. It is an active call to be present and rejoicing at every stage of the way --in the news of conception, in the stretching of the skin, in the false alarms of labor, in the intensity of pushing, and yes, in the cheesy and mangled mess that a newborn really is. We have been invited into such a life of participation, embracing the gift of the present moments in hopes of what is to come.

Children are great at this. While my children know that Advent and Christmas are about Jesus’ birth and the celebration of Christ being present with us, there is something special about this season that draws out a particular kind of joy in them. The sheer excitement that they possess during the month of December is contagious and convicting all at the same time. The joys that they find in the little things like twinkling lights, mesmerizing Christmas villages, the many snowflakes folded and cut out on the windows and hung from the ceiling, their turn lighting the Advent candle, their cup of hot chocolate, and yes, the hourly chime of the Christmas clock is an anticipation that is marked by the embracing of the present moment. For children Christmas is something that is happening to them. Their excitement is participatory.

Children often offer us glimpses of pure joy and anticipation in ways that our tired and marred hearts sometimes fail to see. Such joy is a gift. While anticipation is marked by rhythms of momentum and energy in our lives that keep us hoping and looking forward, the beauty in such anticipation is that it allows freedom to enjoy and embrace the now. It is only when we choose to live into the seemingly small joys of being alive, of friendships, of laughter, of provision, of days off, or whatever it may be, that we are able to anticipate, live into and hope in what is to come.

I pray that our lives would always be pregnant with such anticipation and hope…. not an aimless hope but a hope that is found in a God who creates, breathes and forms our inmost being. May our hope participate in the gift of Christ and in the lives of one another. In this season of busy unrest, find joy in the little things – in the laughter of your child, in the love of your friends, in the smell of your tea, or in the rhythm of your favorite song.

Be full of hope and know that everyday is a gift.

Gail Song Bantum, M.Div, is a 2009 graduate of Duke Divinity school. A well-known worship leader and advocate for the arts, you can find her theology and arts blog at http://gailsongbantum.wordpress.com

In His Arms, So Many Prayers ... So Many Prayers Rest

2009-11-30T08:00:00.004-05:00

By Enuma Okoro, D'03
Author and Retreat Director
Raleigh, North Carolina

It is the week of Christ the King. This past Sunday marked the first in Advent. The last few days have found me ruminating on the dialogue between Pilate and Jesus found in John’s Gospel 18:33b-37. I read the gospel this week and for the first time in a very long while I can imagine myself as disbelieving as Pilate. Not because I’m at any crux of faith but simply because every now and then, by the mercy of God, I am struck anew by the incredibility of the incarnation. When Jesus says, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews,” I can almost hear how “cuckoo for coco puffs” that would have sounded to anyone, and envision the guards behind Pilate just rolling their eyes thinking, “Here goes another one.”

Yet, it is not lost on me that somehow God has enabled me to believe in the absurdity of it all. And while God’s kingdom is not of this world, it is in the very mundane parameters of this world that I find myself continually caught off guard by the wonder of Christ. He breaks in randomly in the midst of my planning and fretting and hoping and achieving, and reminds me of the reality of an incarnate God, a looming Spirit, a returning Christ.

The most recent inbreaking was while I was on the treadmill running to the music from my iPod. I had set it to shuffle mode and was running my last mile on the highs of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, the raunchy duets of Akon and Snoop, and the invigorating girl-power of Beyonce. Then my iPod shuffled to “Picture of Jesus” by Ben Harper and as I listened to the words and to the beautiful South African voices harmonizing in the background I was suddenly overwhelmed by the idea of a God who took on flesh for love of creation, and by a God who still cradles the disharmony of a broken world. After the song played out I pressed the back button and found myself practicing the ancient spiritual discipline of Lectio Divinia to a popular funk artist’s tribute to the Lord of heaven and earth. I listened to that song three times for 15 minutes.

A version of Harper's "Picture of Jesus" set to footage of a Brazilian favela.

The picture of Jesus is mirrored to us through the ordinary people and things of this world. Everywhere we look there is the possibility of catching iconic reflections of Christ. There is the possibility of seeing that God’s kingdom though not of this world, is coming. But we have to be willing to be interrupted. We have to be willing to be reminded that even faith and belief is by grace. And adoration, praise, hope, and expectation, those postures are willed responses.

Advent reminds us that God has always been present, even before the visitation. It reminds us that God is accustomed to having arms full of prayers. It reminds us that God does not force God’s self upon us.

During Advent we keep watch for the random inbreakings, for the absurd in the mundane, for the opportunities to remember that belief itself is not of this world, but this is the world in which God has chosen to make God’s self known.

Find some time over the next few days and download the song, “Picture of Jesus” by Ben Harper. Listen to it several times. You might be surprised where it leads you.

“So Let us say a prayer
For every living thing

Walking towards a light

From the cross of a king

We long to be a picture of Jesus

Of Jesus

In his arms

In his arms so many prayers rest

I long to be a picture of Jesus

With him we shall be forever blessed”

(Ben Harper, Picture of Jesus, track 13, Diamonds on the Inside Audio CD- 2003)

Enuma Okoro is a 2003 Duke Divinity School graduate. She is a writer and retreat leader living in Raleigh, NC. Visit her website at www.devoutmind.com and follow her blogs; http://onemoreblackwoman.blogspot.com and http://reluctantpilgrim.wordpress.com

Precious, Take Our Hand

2009-11-23T09:00:00.004-05:00

By Amey Victoria Adkins, D'09
Research Assistant, Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Let me be frank: Everyone should see the movie Precious.[1]

**Please note that the preview below may contain offensive language.**

I’ve talked about it, read about it, heard about it, prepared for it, and finally, after missing two sold-out showings, I’ve seen it. I sat in the unprecedented stillness of a full theatre as I watched “Precious,” the story of a battered but resilient young woman originally characterized in the novel “Push” by Sapphire. The movie postures us in the world of Claireece “Precious” Jones, a dark-skinned, overweight 16-year old black woman enduring physical, verbal, emotional and sexual abuses unspeakable—she is already pregnant with a second child from episodes of serial rape by her own father.

What I have not loved, however, is the way that a story like Precious seems to be so easily escaping us. With so many advocacy groups jumping on board to promote their cause via the conduit of the movie, it is difficult to discern the ways in which making this movie a “call to action,” be it against child abuse or growing illiteracy rates, performs a reduction of what is most profoundly at hand—even though Precious is a fictitious character, the people who do identify with her circumstances can’t be reduced to causes. For others concerned with painted pathologies and “inside” conversations being hung out to dry, therein also lies a tired tactic of evasion. I think that this narrative has something deeper to teach, particularly to those who claim to be Christians.

I found it no coincidence that God is not found in the places one might think in this story. By my count, there are only two explicit references to the divine throughout (at least asserted by Precious herself). Once, Precious throws off on the idea that “God or whoever” is looking down from above. No surprise seeing that she hasn’t seen salvation from the frying pans that her mother throws unrelentingly at her head. The other overt and inherently Christian reference occurs in a moment of desperation.

At one of her lowest points, Precious and her newborn son Abdul (an interesting choice of an Arabic name, meaning something akin to “servant of God,” given that her daughter with Down’s Syndrome is named Mongoloid. “Mongo” for short.) have barely escaped a violent death at the hands of Precious’ mother. It is Christmas, and she is afraid, exposed and running for her life. Holding the tiny baby in the wintry cold, swaddled in the blanket covered in her own blood, Precious walks past a church mission. An unmistakable cross looms above her and she peers through the gated door. Looking through the window, a fleeting daydream transforms the gathering inside into a warm holiday choir scene, with she and her newborn fully robed and rejoicing in praise, her light-skinned-curly-haired husband looking adoringly over her shoulder. They are clean, every hair is in place, her makeup is beautifully done, and her imagined partner even holds a small pet dog in his arms. It is the perfect nativity, and yet, the falling snow transforms us again to the painful fragility of the moment: for Precious, there is no room at the inn. Even the doors of the church are only unlocked by her imagination.

And yet, there is an unmistakable salvific community for Precious—just not the kind of community most of us would imagination. Moved to an alternative school after her second pregnancy, Ms. Rain’s classroom becomes a kind of “church,” a place where she is affirmed and encouraged, a place where her gifts are stirred, a place where her promise is called out. It is a rather motley crew of outcasts who gather each day in the tiny classroom on the 11^th floor. Immigrants, teenage mothers, minority women facing the harsh realities of a world where they don’t quite fit, all led by an amazing teacher who happens to be black and lesbian. It is here that Precious finds worth, community, dignity, support, and most of all love.

After yet another unrelenting blow of tragedy, Precious sits in the classroom vacantly. She is at the end of her words; she has nothing left to write. Precious laments, “Nobody loves me.” She begs of her teacher, “Please don’t lie to me.” Everyone in her life who was supposed to love her failed. And only in that space, in that community, is Precious reminded of real love. And perhaps for the first time, someone she can trust has told her: “I love you, Precious.” When there was no where to go, when the doors of the church were locked, Precious went to school, and waited for her family—not that by birth or blood, but that by a deep kind of other bond—to come for her.

I think that this brings us closer to the point. In a conversation with beloved sister-theologians of color the other evening, we began to discuss the way that Katie Couric struggled to maintain her bearings while interviewing Sapphire a few weeks ago about the story. At one point, her worlds failing, she stutters “I just can’t imagine.”

I realized, in that moment, that Couric’s efforts represent our problem precisely . The Church maintains a tenuous theological imagination, one that often asks the wrong question. Because I don’t think that our deepest call is to finds ways to imagine ourselves inside of the horror, experiencing the trauma of Precious’ story. Far too many women and men already live inside of this intimate space of negotiation day in and day out—and there is too great a chasm that will either cheapen the very real experiences of so many people in the world, or further distance us away from one another. Imagination, in that instance, is a luxury.

But perhaps what is critical for us, is the question of whether or not we can imagine ourselves living with, journeying with, being present with, working with, and loving with someone who is marked by such intense suffering. I read an interview online where Lee Daniels, the brilliant director of the movie, stated that prior to this work he had a negative stereotype himself of fat black women. He was disgusted by it, but his confession was true. Precious was a mirror into his own thoughts. Precious challenged him. Perhaps, then, if Precious can challenge Lee Daniels, Precious should be challenging us in the same kinds of probing ways. And for the church, perhaps Precious can be a kind of mirror to who we say that we are. To who we say God is. And to how we live into the unimaginable grit of a tortured but risen Lord.

Do we see Precious? Can we imagine ourselves kissing her on the forehead? Cleaning the blood off of her young baby? Letting her stay in our homes? Not reducing her identity (read: her badgering school principal’s irresponsible teenage mother stereotype) to a problem of ethics? And for those of us who navigate the spaces of pain that remain far too often as silent realities in our midst, can we imagine facing the lies we’ve been told? Can we imagine the continued perseverance and grasping for hope even when it seems senseless?

I think so, but not if we are alone. Not if churches don’t see their need of the Precious living on their block. Not if we realize that our single garment of destiny has no hem without her. Not if we miss opportunities to have truth-telling break the demonic silences in our midst. This movie is one that bears theological weight upon the issue of real presence in the world, and the one scene featuring the inadequacy of the church-as-institution is one worth mulling over. For if we refuse Precious, have we not refused the gift of our Lord?

[1] Caveats: This movie is too graphic for children and young teens. And, you shouldn’t go alone.

On the Significance of Pauli Murray (Part I)

2009-11-16T08:00:00.001-05:00

***In honor of Pauli Murray's birthday this week (November 20), we are sharing the following reflections as well as local (Durham) information on activities honoring the occasion. Happy Birthday, Pauli!***

By Dr. Willie James Jennings

Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies

Duke Divinity School

At the beginning of a seminary career, one of the best people to be introduced to is Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray. Born November 20, 1910 and died July 1, 1985, Pauli Murray was one of the most important Christian intellectuals of the last century. Poet, writer, activist, lawyer, and the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal Priest, Murray bequeathed to us a eloquent and powerful testimony of a Christian pilgrimage through some of the most troubled times in American history. If you have never read her novelistic account of her family in Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family or her autobiography, Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest and Poet you owe it to yourself to read these crucial texts.[i]

The Episcopal Church USA is considering elevating Murray to the status of saint and while these deliberations are going on, we thought that it would be a good thing to reflect on Pauli Murray’s life over the next several months. The basic contours of her story are as follows: Born in Baltimore, Maryland to William Murray and Agnes Fitzgerald Murray. Her father was a school principal and her mother a nurse. After their untimely deaths, Pauli moved to Durham, North Carolina. Her father suffered from mental illness due to the effects of typhoid fever and was killed by a guard at the Crownsville State Hospital. In Durham, she was raised by her grandparents Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald, and her aunts Pauline and Sallie. Pauli graduated from Hillside High school, Hunter College in New York, and Howard University Law School. She later received her JD from Yale Law School.

A number of “firsts” mark her life. She was the first African American attorney to work for the law firm she worked for in New York, the first African American woman to receive the Yale J.D., the first African American to serve as deputy attorney general for the state of California and most notably for theological educational concerns, she was the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest. This was after she had attended and graduated from General Theological Seminary in New York. In between, during, and after these events, Pauli Murray, was a professor, poet, writer, civil rights and women’s rights activist, founding member of NOW, astute public critic and intellectual, and always a deeply committed Christian.

One of the most important gifts a student can give herself as she moves through seminary or any kind of educational experience are models of people whose life paths illumines embodied wisdom. Pauli Murray is just such a person. We can learn so much from every aspect of her life, her struggles and victories, her frustrations and joys, her fears and her hopes. I would like to briefly consider an incident she recounts from her childhood in Durham. Murray’s brilliant text, Proud Shoes, examines the complex legacy of mixed race existence in America.

The very first chapter of that fine book introduces us to her grandmother Cornelia Fitzgerald who proudly proclaims that she is was

“a white man’s child. A fine white man at that. A southern aristocrat. If you want to know what I am, I’m an octoroon. I don’t have to mix in with good-for-nothing niggers if I don’t want to. I don’t like trashy folks whether they’re black, white, blue or yaller. If you mix with the dogs you’ll be bitten by the fleas.” (Proud Shoes, 16)

In this incident, the grandmother then goes on to hurl several racial invectives at her troublesome black neighbors who goat her on. One particular woman, Lucy Bergins, angers Cornelia so much that this elderly woman attempts to climb a fence to get at her. This is when the young Pauli intervenes, trying to keep her grandmother from beating the woman with a mattock.

Granma! Granma! I screamed. “Come down quick. I got something important to tell you.” “Lemme go, child!” Grandmother was doing her best to kick free and hold her balance. Her leg jerked backward like a cow’s hind leg at milking time. She dangled while I held on. “Granma, I tell you it’s important.” Grandmother tried to pull her leg up once more, then gave up and let it fall back, sending me tumbling to the ground. “What on earth do you want Baby?” she asked. However angry Grandmother was about other things she was never harsh with me… “Bend down, so’s I can tell you in your ear.” I didn’t want Lucy or the neighbors to hear me. Grandmother reluctantly climbed off the fence and bent down.

“Granma,” I whispered, “I know it ain’t Sunday but I got the big Bible on the front porch, the one Miss Mary Smith gave you. Come down to the house right now quick, and I’ll read to you in the Psalms. I’ll even try to read a little about ‘Zekiel in the valley of the dry bones and Dan’l in the lion’s den.” I had touched on Grandmother’s two favorite Bible selections. And she treasured that ragged old Bible Miss Mary Smith of Chapel Hill had given her more than any other article in the house. She said she got it when she was a little girl and was confirmed at the Chapel of the Cross. It was over one hundred years old.

It was the one book that Grandmother tried to read herself, peering through her glasses and spelling out the Psalms a word at a time. I had learned to read some of the Psalms by now and every Sunday evening I would read to Grandmother some of her favorite passages. She seemed so proud of having me read to her from the big Bible that I loved it as much as she did….I liked the sound of the words rolling off my tongue and I would let my voice rise and fall like a wailing wind just as I had heard Reverend Small chant the morning lesson at St. Titus on Sundays. Grandmother had utmost respect for the Holy Word.

She hesitated. “You sure got me where the hair is short, Baby,” she said. “Why would you want to read the Bible to me when I’m so vexed?” I could see she was weakening. “You said any time was a good time to read the Scripture, didn’t you? Please come on to the house…” Grandmother considered. The sweat was pouring down her face and her clothes were soaked with it. Her face was flushed and she was panting hard. I pulled her gently toward the house…Grandmother picked up the mattock and took a step toward home. “I’ve never been one to turn my back on the Word of God,” she said. (Proud Shoes, 20-22)

This is one story that offers us a glimpse of the complexity of Pauli’s life beginning with her grandmother. Here we are introduced to the legacy of mixed race existence and the color caste system endemic to it and the violence and self-hatred embedded inside it. But we are also introduced to the place of the scripture, the compelling place of scripture in the lives of African Americans. What stood between Pauli’s grandmother’s desire to inflict punishment through violence on this taunting neighbor was nothing less than her granddaughter invoking the scripture, scripture to be read, scripture to be remembered. Yet equally crucial for grasping Pauli’s rich life is the powerful joining in her grandmother’s love of the scripture and the sound of her young voice reading, speaking the word of God, just like the minister at St. Titus. Indeed it is precisely this rich soil of reading scripture aloud that holds the seeds that grow into voices heard strongly and callings heard clearly.

This was the case with Pauli Murray. It could be that if you reflect on your voice and your own sense of calling you might find a history marked by conflict, race, and the scriptures. Such things don’t point to bad beginnings, but important ones.

[i] Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest and Poet (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).

Happy Birthday, Pauli!

2009-11-15T20:00:00.001-05:00

Dr. Joy J. Moore

Associate Dean for Black Church Studies and Church Relations

Duke Divinity School

As a key figure in our theological lineage, we invite you to join us in supporting and attending local Durham events that honor the legacy and accomplishments of Pauli Murray, sponsored by Duke University and the Pauli Murray Project. Happy Birthday, Pauli!!

PAULI MURRAY LECTURE WITH

DR. BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL

November 19, 2009 7:00 pm

Community, Family Life and Recreation Center at Lyon Park

Dr. Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College. She is also the President of the National Women’s Studies Association.

PAULI MURRAY BIRTHDAY PARTY
November 22, 2009 3:00 pm
Community, Family Life and Recreation Center at Lyon Park
Cake, Celebration and Poetry with local artists and members of Pauli Murray’s family! Come out and celebrate the life and story of an amazing lawyer, activist, priest and poet.
Events Free and Open to the Public Community, Family Life and Recreation Center at Lyon Park, 1313 Halley Street at Kent Street

Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" and the Future of Theology: The Order of Disorder and the Politics of Confusion

2009-11-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

By Dr. Brian Bantum, Divinity '03
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Houston Baker discussed the power of the Harlem Renaissance and black artistic expression as the "mastery of form and the deformation of mastery." By this phrase Baker refers to the power of black artists to master the forms of European artistic expression and then turn them inside out to re-express notions of human freedom that were denied by the very same European forms that sought to oppress and enslave them.

Listening to John Coltrane's 1961 version of "My Favorite Things" I could not help but be reminded of Baker's analysis, but also being a theologian I began to imagine the possibilities for theological reflection.

The iconic "My Favorite Things" of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical "The Sound of Music" still reminds me of post-Christmas hot chocolate and the ideal of romping through the hills in familial bliss, leaving all of the nastiness of a Nazi regime far, far away.

But in Coltrane's rendition only 2 years later, the familial bliss remains within the horror. Coltrane's "favorite things" takes place not upon the placid hills of a neutral borderland, but within the torment of a violent America, and his own tortured soul.

The refrain recalling one's favorite things are not uttered in secure possibility. In this time everything the black man or woman wants or desires is punctuated by their refusal. They are thirsty, but there is a fountain they cannot drink from. They want a house, but there is always a house they can never have, they want to teach, to be a doctor, to travel… all of these possibilities are always punctuated by a declarative NO.

In the gaps of these refusals they still find joy, they still find one another. In this respect to speak of your favorite things is to confess both the joys, the small things that bring meaning to your life and comfort you in moments of fear or despair, but these things can never be spoken of in a tidy way. They are always bound to the death, the refusal, the dehumanization of the modern world upon dark bodies.

Coltrane moves within the piece at one moment stripping down the melody to its barest elements and then flows into addition, to filling out the melody in ways that one could not have thought possible. Both moments deepen and widen the significance of the melody. But here additions and the reductions account for the paradox of one’s desires in Coltrane’s time. Desires here were always met with refusals, hope with death, an ebb and flow of finding enough in the scarcity and making something out of nothing, and yet in this paradox of wanting what one could not have: they yet had, they desired, they found joy.

The stripping down and the reductions do not distort the song, they do not render the song irrational but in fact point to the paradox of our own lives as having what we ought not to want, and bending towards that which is not meant for us, while still refusing that which is intended for us.

Coltrane deepens our understanding of our condition by laying bare our desires and the refusal of these desires. Within the churchly space we do not meet God with our own order, but with being laid bare and being shown who we are. This encounter throws us into the dynamic range of God’s song where we must lament our own failures, confess our own misshapen desires. We must cry out for we are refused and oppressed and yet in the midst of this we also sing that sweet melody of hope, that refrain of God’s promise that never grows quiet in the wailing of our brothers and sisters or their quiet meditations.

In the dynamic movement of this song we find order, we find God. Order is our being misshapen, “de-ranged” and re-arranged. Sometimes it is not us but our neighbor who is confronted with their own powerlessness and must cry out. sometimes it is our neighbor who bears a quiet certainty that witnesses to God’s faithfulness. Perhaps the question is not how do we order these two seemingly disparate moments, but rather what is it that prevents us from binding these realities (and the people who so often exhibit them) from finding a home in the same space? Thus it is not a question of ordering music or art, or thoughts, but becoming undone by a new social arrangement.

It is this amalgamation of despair and possibility that I find so compelling within Coltrane's rendition. And while the song seemed rooted within a European ideal (or an American idealization of Europe), Coltrane's rendition speaks to its deepest possibility, mastering the form of its quiet longings but also wrapping those longings within the deep pain of the present. In this way, it spoke dramatically to its contemporary moment in a way that Hammerstein probably could not have imagined himself.

Is it possible for theologians to re-imagine themselves and their work within Coltrane's re-imagination of "My Favorite Things?" So many concerned for justice and mercy have found Christianity or at least its doctrine as the central culprit. But is it possible for us to utter this tune anew, to master the form so that we might deform the mastery? Is it necessary that we leave the central claims concerning our God? That the child in the manger was God? That the resurrection was not a symbol, but a real moment of liberation for now and a time to come? Is it possible to think of theological liberation apart from these claims? This is the possibility of theological reflection. Theology done "classically" is a theology that idealizes a past imaging a possibility for a future in a neutral land. But perhaps theology (and our Christian lives) might be able to imagine the claims of the Christian tradition anew, mastering its forms in order to unleash it for new work in a broken world whose masters have mistaken themselves for gods.

Can our theology utter dissonant tones and shrieking of righteous anger and yet still remind us of "our favorite thing" even when “when the bee stings, when the dogs bark…”

I hope this is the case. For my darker brothers and sisters who have and are having questions concerning the possibility of theology, of the claims of the church that have stretched so long... Coltrane can speak to us about the possibilities of these claims. We can sing this song and in a way that can remind creation of its calling in the midst of its unfaithfulness.

To those who so vehemently "defend" the faith, who uphold orthodoxy in the face of its attackers... is it possible that in our stripping down of the melody we have sung it truer? Perhaps the improvisational runs and dissonant chords of we, your darker brothers and sisters have spoken to a truth not visible within the neat logic of Western philosophy.

I do not know the answer to these questions, but I do believe Coltrane has something to teach us on the way.

When the Spirit says sing ...

2009-11-04T08:00:00.002-05:00

Dr. Joy J. Moore

Associate Dean for Black Church Studies and Church Relations

Duke Divinity School

Article: When the Spirit says sing

Check out this feature on the Faith & Leadership blog on the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, where the group reflects on the deep African-American traditions that lace their songs and their spirits. It will certainly be worth your while. The video below is their popular "Ella's Song." Surely, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.

A Cup In Common?

2009-10-27T08:00:00.001-04:00

By Dr. Amy Laura Hall
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Duke Divinity School

Do not touch ANYTHING. No, No. Stop it. Put that down. It has germs. Wash your hands. Wash them really, really well. Scrub!

Go hang out in the bathroom at your local children’s museum. This is what you will hear. Again, and again, and again. This was true way before H1N1. Go outside the bathroom, and stand by the drinking fountain. You will hear a related liturgy. Do NOT put your mouth on the spigot. Stop it. You are too close. Don’t lick the metal! It has germs.

Do we have a cup in common? After whom am I willing to drink?

A beloved friend whose family owned a Drug Store during Jim Crow told me a story about the Lord’s Supper. It wasn’t explicitly a story about the Lord’s Supper. But it was, in a way. When his parents made the decision to integrate the soda counter, they changed to paper cups. They were already going to lose white customers when those customers had to sit elbow to elbow with their African-American neighbors. But they figured they might not lose as many if people could drink their soda without wondering whether the cup was sufficiently washed free of their neighbor’s germs. (Photo Credit: UMC.org)

There is a line in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that seared me. (If you are white, don’t read Gilead unless you are willing to go on and read Home.) Robinson has a Black character aver that “all white men are atheists, the only difference is that some of them are aware of it.”

Paper cups are a sign of unbelief. Lord, help our unbelief.

Several years ago a student in one of my large classes had most of us suspecting ourselves of atheism. We had been talking about our fears of germs, and about the ways that our parishioners are afraid of a cup in common. Stan then gently explained how his congregation who used a common cup dealt with the revelation that a member was HIV positive. “First, we prayed and fasted.” Ok, well, that left out about half of the room. (Prayed and fasted? His congregation prays and fasts when faced with conflict?) But then he went on to explain that the congregation decided that they would continue to use the common cup. Only they would make sure that the HIV positive member was invited to partake first.

Bingo. Nope. Never mind. I did not sign up for that sort of faith. Thank you very much. People shook their heads in disbelief. Stan told us that the others in the congregation realized that their germs were much more dangerous to their loved one than their loved one’s germs were to them. The last shall be first. Maybe this sounds beautiful in an anthem, but it is really, really hard to sing.

Now, if we get going on a conversation about biology, about the technical specifications of particular germs, about the composition of the wine or the Welch’s, we’ve missed a chance to get a clue.

This cup of blessing which we bless, is it or is it not, a sharing in the blood of Christ?

A Recession-Proof Gospel?

2009-10-19T08:00:00.006-04:00

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

The NY Times ran a front page Sunday article recently that is well worth pausing over: “Even in Recession, Believers Invest in the Gospel of Getting Rich”. It was occasioned by the “Southwest Believers’ Convention” held in the Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX area this summer in August.

The article conveys many of the things already known about the prosperity “gospel of getting rich” as preached by the likes of Kenneth and Gloria Copeland (the focus of the article), Creflo Dollar (who participated in the Convention held in Ft. Worth), and others. It told of the lavish lifestyles of these preachers, their private jets, multiple cars, etc etc etc.

This alone did not give me pause, for it has been much documented and talked about.

What did give me serious pause, however, and what did ultimately prod me to put fingers to keyboard, is the image, the photograph, that appeared on the front page of the Sunday article. For we all know the saying: a picture’s worth a thousand words.

Along with this front page article is a picture of what appears to be an African American, elderly woman. (If she’s not African American, she certainly appears to be a woman of color). She contrasts starkly with the Copelands, whose photos are on the Times website version of the article.

There is not only a racial difference at work, but more noticeable are the class distinctions that are at work. The Copelands have the look of the professional, managerial class; they are polished; they exude Christian leadership. In another photo on the Times website, Copeland walks across the front of the altar, passionately gripping the bible. By contrast, the woman on the frontpage of the photo looks to be from the underclass. Nowhere near as polished looking, her clothes are common. You only see an image from the back; never her face. She is placing perhaps her last “piece of change,” as my momma used to say, on the altar steps at the Convention.

This image struck me, for though I am a Christian theologian teaching at Duke University Divinity School, I’ve not forgotten where I came from. During my early teen years, I first started attending regularly an old Pentecostal church with -- you guessed it -- my grandmother, a woman at least representationally not unlike the woman in the Times photo. My old church was filled, and still is filled, with “saints” like this.

This brings me to the deeper questions inside of the Times article on what seems to be the recession-proof “gospel of getting rich”.

And that is this: On the other side of the prosperity gospel of getting rich are people I know, people exploited by smooth, silver-tongued Christian leaders. It’s easy to say, Yup, that’s the problem with prosperity preaching. Yup, that’s what can happened when you’re not a seminary-trained minister. You abuse the bible, etc.

But the deeper questions are these: What are the ways that others from the polished, managerial class, even Christian leaders who disavow the get rich gospel, use the gospel and exploit others to get paid and to establish their kingdoms, all in the name, as it were, of doing good?

Inside of the Times article is a frightening truth that Christians of all stripes -- seminarians, pastors, teachers; all of us -- must face: There’s more than one way to be a smooth talker and to use the gospel as a vehicle to get paid, and to hide the fact that this is what’s happening right inside of our Christian talk.

But here’s the last question: What does it mean that disproportionately it’s people like the black woman pictured on the front page of the NT Times who are the hidden, voiceless ones on the other side of the get-rich gospel? Yeah, as the saying goes, everybody's trying to paid; to which I would add that, for some folks, the Gospel is their cash cow.

But what does it mean that the exploitation to get paid "in Jesus' name" falls disproportionately on non-white, female bodies? Why is she the sign of exploitation?

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Why Obama Can't Win When He Wins

2009-10-12T08:00:00.003-04:00

By Dr. Brian Bantum, Divinity '03
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

On Friday October 9, 2009 it was announced to much surprise and bewilderment that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. This announcement was met with a fury of support as well as disbelief. “He hasn’t accomplished anything yet,” was a refrain repeated by Facebook statuses and opinion articles alike. One CNN report framed Obama’s accomplishment in this way, “Unlike his predecessors, Obama was chosen not for substantive accomplishments, but for inspiring "hope" at the start of his term.”

I am not sure President Obama deserved the prestigious award any more than Al Gore did in 2007. I am not sure you could point to Gore’s documentary as a turning point in environmental policy. But both Gore and Obama represented something. Each posed a significant question to the world through their candidacy or their advocacy. But what is so interesting to me here is not the question of whether the peace prize was deserved or not, but how the question of representation is so central to this issue and to the reality of our modern world.

The Obama presidency has come to exemplify the complication of minority identity in the modern world. On the one hand the arrival of dark bodies into a place of power is met with the inflammation (or explosion) of resistance (see a sign to “nigger rig the Obama healthcare plan”) or more explicitly “you lie” from a now emboldened southern congressmen. But Obama also faces a surreal elevation of his capacities and possibilities that are difficult to imagine any one achieving. Obama is trapped within these violent refusals or violent incorporations. He is quickly becoming bound within the tragedy of modern racial representation.

Obama’s presence within the walls of American power has seemingly coalesced a people who have long felt themselves under threat. For many the “American Way of Life” is under siege from a President who ironically personifies the “American Dream.” Congressman Joe Wilson’s donations have ballooned since his comment and represent a marked discontent for this particular president. But this resistance is more than a disagreement about policy. Cries of “socialism” could be seen as a simple euphemism for the racial estrangement some people now feel from “their” country. And now without a perceived ally in the White House, but even worse a “foreigner,” all that is left is to persistently undermine Obama’s progress because his progress can only mean the devaluing of “American” identity. These objections have little to do with Obama personally and have everything to do with what Obama represents.

But on the other hand Obama suffers from the elevation of post-civil rights yearning to claim some movement forward, perhaps even some easement of a burdensome white guilt. Many are so elated to have finally turned a corner in American racial politics that they will endorse his presidency a success just by virtue that he is a black man. Yet, this claim has little to do with Obama and more to do with how many hope to represent their own place in the world. They support a black president and therefore are progressive, forward thinking people, unlike other backwards-looking people. While the committee of the Nobel Peace Prize undoubtedly admired Obama, were they really seeing the man and his accomplishments or what they hoped for him and for themselves? Through these means of unequivocal support Obama comes to represent an ideal of Americanism or global citizenship.

But what is lost in the midst of these movements of refusal or assumption is who Obama is. People cannot extricate themselves from the veneer of his race to see how his ethnicity, his life, his relationships all participate in actually animating his decision making. Instead his blackness has been co-opted into a representation of his foreignness or refracted into a statement about white (European) hope.

Sadly, this is the predicament of minority existence in the modern world. We, non-white people are either refused because of our racial demarcation through perpetual interrogation of our qualifications, our intentions, our methods. Or we are quickly subsumed into a hope for a multicultural university, or institution, or church, or world. Our pictures become parts of marketing campaigns and we are invited to every lunch. But we are not heard, we are not made a part of these machines. We are used. We are represented and then deployed for a purpose that often has more to do with the one’s representing than the one who is represented. Our lives become represented for us rather than being heard for the complicated realities that they are and in that particular story we come to find hope and the possibility of change.

This reflex of co-opting representation is not new but sadly it is a mark of our human condition. The representation and deployment of bodies for those of us who claim the name of Christ must see this within the optics of theological representation and transformation. In Christ’s birth God was represented to us, shown to us. This presence was not for our redeployment but for our transformation. We consume Christ’s body to become something different. Instead we consume Christ in order to re-create ourselves. As we co-opt Christ into our world, our hopes we re-deploy Jesus to serve an agenda that has little to do with Jesus and everything to do with us.

The representation of Obama as facilitator of peace or as an evil foreigner has little to do with Obama and everything to do with how we must begin to think about ourselves anew when confronted with people of difference. For Obama (and all people of color) this is the tragedy of modern identity. We, people of color, become deployed within worlds of white assumption or refusal and are repeatedly left for dead in the encounter.

If we are to imagine a way forward we can no longer represent others for ourselves. We must enter into the life of God “represented” to us and as us. Jesus was bound between expectations of what could and could not be. His death and resurrection assumed these refusals and accommodations into his own body so that we might imagine ourselves in the life of another. Obama is not Jesus. But this violence of representation to him arises out of a condition of sin that Christ came to overcome.

Instead, we see in the vilification and the “heroification” of Obama a tragic reiteration of our human condition. In capitulating to an economy of representation and distancing we all make real personhood impossible.

I pray that Obama (or his work for us) does not die simply to sustain our hopes about ourselves.

Who's Coming to Dinner?

2009-10-05T08:00:00.007-04:00

By Dr. Amy Laura Hall
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Duke Divinity School

"What if this is just like the Tawana Brawley case?" I asked. Syndi turned and looked at me, with obvious surprise, and appreciation. "Exactly! I bet this is going to be exactly like that." She was staring at me like I had become, instantly, a different person. We had been friends for two years, but the recognition in her face was something I'd never seen. This was not at all what I had expected. I had steeled myself for an argument, only tentatively asking the question. It took me about three minutes to get a clue. The moment was a horrible intersection, a cross of misunderstanding. I was saying exactly the opposite of what she thought I was saying, and the question she heard coming out of my mouth had initiated, for a moment, a kinship that I hadn't even known was missing, until I saw it all over her face. After a pause, I said, "No, I am so, so sorry. I meant, what if she isn't telling the truth?" Our friendship really never recovered, on either side. I hadn't known what we were missing until, for about three minutes, I caught a glimpse of true friendship. The person she had suspected me to be had now been confirmed, and nothing I could say would quite make up the difference.

Syndi and I were both undergrads and residence advisors at a school in the South. We dealt with vomit, sorority girls passed out on the bathroom floor, pre-med students freaking out in the middle of the night -- all the things that forge a bond between students paid to take care of other students. But the rift that went through our campus that year felt unsurpassable to both of us. A student was suffering deeply from tragically racist images written all over her dorm room, repeatedly. Students and faculty were talking about the case in classrooms and late at night in dorm hallways. To many African-American students, the repeated, hateful scrawl just made more obvious what was subtly written all over the school -- a sense that Black people had better watch their backs. The happy race-diversity veneer was about half an inch thick. As one editorialist put it, Atlanta may be a city too busy to hate, but, give white Southerners a bit of time, and they will remember how.

Now, here, if you are reading this and wondering whether or not Tawana Brawley or this suffering undergrad were fabricating tragedy or actually surviving it, we've missed a chance to get a clue. The moment was like a Rorschach test. Like the end of Do the Right Thing. Like watching a guy from South Carolina shout "You Lie" at the President. Like the Duke Lacrosse case. Forget the whole "Who is my neighbor?" abstraction. These sorts of moments ask "Who is your kin?"

The cover of a recent issue of Newsweek had a huge baby face with words across its forehead blaring "Is Your Baby Racist?" The article is complicated, but the basic gist is this. Even babies note differences in skin color. No big shock to me there. (The title of the book discussed is "NurtureShock.") The take home message of studies on race and parenting is worth a good, long, potentially painful moment of truth. Quoting the article, "It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every [white, volunteer] parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race." These parents wanted their kids to "grow up colorblind," and used lots of phrases like "everybody's equal," but the kids heard it mostly as blah, blah, blah from mom or dad. As one mom explained, after years of repeating the "equal" mantra, her kid finally asked, "What does equal mean?" He hadn't a clue. Kids note difference, early, and droning on about equality matters not a hill of beans.

Integrated education "gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them." It continues, "Those increased opportunities to interact are also, effectively, increased opportunities to reject each other." As anyone who has gone to an integrated school can tell you, we are not "All in this Together" dancing in beautiful diversity with perky costumes. Racial issues in the wider culture are pointier, stickier, puce rather than pink, in school hallways. Ask any middle schooler who trusts you enough to be honest.

Sometimes our children are our best mirrors. My youngest and I were sitting for over an hour waiting for a new tire. I had no nifty bag of tricks, only the cheesy magazines stacked on the little table next to the two chairs. We played every game I could imagine with the pictures of perfume ads and advice on how to cook a better casserole. She came up with a new game, "matching weddings." She proceeded to go through and match up which man would be right for the woman in the perfume ad. Which guy should woo this woman in the mom-skinny jeans? There weren't many men, so she ended up pairing some of them twice. But polygamy wasn't worrying me. What shouldn't have surprised me but did was that she spent a good deal of time trying to make sure everyone was matched, Black with Black, White with White. This trumped other considerations. Uncle Ben ended up with Halle Berry. Thing is, it didn't seem to matter a fig that my little one is bi-racial.

"Mom," she said, her voice rolling her eyes and then some, "Who do we know who isn't matched that way?" Huh. Pause. I named one couple we know moderately well. She looked at me again like I was stupid. "Mom, he doesn't look Black, and they aren't really our friends. I mean, they don't come over for dinner or anything." Bingo.

Of course children note race. Of course they are watching us for cues. One of the studies in the article involves a Black Santa. Read it online just for this page alone. A group of white school children are thoroughly befuddled when their teacher reads a new version of The Night Before Christmas. Some of them shift uncomfortably when they see the family in the book is Black. But the class is sent aflutter when the teacher turns the page and Santa himself is Black. "A couple of the white children rejected this idea out of hand: a black Santa couldn't be real. But even the little girl [who was] the most adamant that the Real Santa must be white came around to accept the possibility that a black Santa could fill in for White Santa if he was hurt." Yep.

In the next week's issue, Newsweek ran responses to the article. In the age of Twitter, they now feature a little box with responses in only six words, in this case on "the roots of racism." Sandy Davidson from Youngstown, Ohio wrote the six words: "Religion taken out of our schools." I am not sure exactly what Ms. Davidson means here, but I am willing to take a cue. (One might argue that a book about Santa comes pretty close to religion in school, but, I digress . . .) The article, as I read it, begs for another kind of family, and a particular truth that Christianity is supposed to quicken in me and my little ones. Saying "God made everyone, red and yellow, black and white," is all well and good, but it probably doesn't mean much if almost everyone at your church is white.

The good liberals of Austin can repeat "equal" until their faces turn Obama blue, but their kids are watching who comes to dinner. And guess who, it turns out, isn't coming to dinner? My eldest was the most clued in during the first three years of her life, when we were going to a church whose children were predominately African-American. The year she was three, she told everybody proudly that she was an African-American cat for Halloween. She had been held, loved on, scolded, and taught by African-American women, women who adopted her even though they were not very sure about her grad student mom. This was one of the few things I have done right by either of my children. We all came up and ate what we explained was Jesus' body and drank what we explained was Jesus' blood. At Mardi Gras, we danced around together in purple and green beads. In that place, it was easy to believe that Jesus is Black.

I hope and pray that both my precious girls will grow up with a clue. I've put them in schools where they have to get a clue, and fast. Yes, school matters. Yes, words matter. But what I am pretty sure matters loads more is how we break our bread, and with whom. May it be so.

Undoing Jefferson: Moral Education and Theological Formation

2009-09-28T08:00:00.001-04:00

Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

This summer I went through a rite of passage for many parents, I took my child on several college tours. My oldest daughter, Njeri, is a rising senior at Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina. We decided to travel across part of the country making stops at several colleges. The first stop we made on our educational pilgrimage was William and Mary, a beautiful school nestled on lush grounds in the historic town of Williamsburg, Virginia. The admissions presentation was excellent and the tour guide was wonderful. As we were taking the tour the tour guide brought us to a statue of Thomas Jefferson placed near the center of the campus. I have seen pictures and statues of Jefferson before (I have been on the campus of University of Virginia), but I was stunned by this statue.

What I found striking in this pose was not the classic stance, but the sense of animation it expresses. This is Jefferson full of youthful energy, abounding in confidence and self assurance, looking out on the world as though it holds only possessive possibilities for him. The tour guide told us the story of this statue, its relation to the University of Virginia and the significance of its direction. Jefferson is looking in the opposite direction of the University of Virginia (the school he founded) and toward what is now the Sir Christopher Wren Building and William and Mary (the school that formed him). This statue is set perfectly at the height of onlookers. It is just slightly higher than the average height so that only fairly tall people would look Jefferson in the eyes as they stand next to him. But to stand next to the statue is both inspiring and a bit intimidating, calling its observers to rise to the sight of Jefferson and look out on the world with him, like him.

The statue is an example of pedagogical genius. Here students have a young version of a founding father, one who is like them but not like them, one who they know very well in terms of what he became but there in the statue captured in his becoming. Jefferson in this moment is a possibility, just like the students are possibilities, for growth, for significance, for greatness.

But as I stood there looking at this perfect statue of Jefferson, I kept thinking about a brilliant book I have been reading by Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008) This fabulous book builds on her earlier fine work, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University of Virginia Press, 1998) which gives a powerful account of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave concubine, Sally Hemings. Gordon-Reed in The Hemingses of Monticello gives us not only a full picture of the Hemings family living, breathing, moving inside the colonial world, but she also gives us a glimpse of what it might have been like for Sally Hemings to be caught inside the life of Thomas Jefferson. What must life have been like for this woman whose life of bondage encompassed the complexities of love and desire, personal agency and social control, hope and longing, chattel dependence and familial belonging? Gordon-Reed gently explores this question with satisfying results but what I find so intriguing about this treatment of the Sally Heming-Thomas Jefferson relationship within the wider context of their familial network is the way the subjective reality of Jefferson the man shapes so much of Sally’s life and that of her family. Gordon-Reed notes this.

The personal Jefferson had dominated the lives of the Hemingses. Their family connections to him, first through his wife and John Wayles and then the connections he created on his own with Sally Hemings, shaped the course of the family’s existence. (Hemingses of Monticello, 654)

Jefferson’s life, as Gordon-Reed shows, is not merely the controlling center of Sally Hemings’ life, but is far more the house inside of which she explores her own identity, measures her own life span, and gauges her own significance. This would not be a unique feature of mulatto slave concubines, because in many ways such one-sidedness marked the lives of many married colonial women, although with arguably far less intensity than a female slave. What I wondered about as I stood looking at the Jefferson statue on the grounds of William and Mary was the connection between an educational process shaped in privilege and performed under the legacy of colonial power and the capacity to live a life that swallows up the lives of others. I wondered about the connection between intellectual prowess and ambition and a consuming narcissism that unrelentingly turns peoples into objects for self-edification, or actors in the play of a single life. Gordon-Reed notes the trajectory bound to Jefferson’s education.

Unlike some other sons of the planter class, Jefferson was not sent to study in England, but received the best education that Virginia could offer, and he made the most of it. Ambitious, brilliant, and hardworking a young man as he was, he could not have foreseen the heights to which he would rise, because those ‘heights’ did not exist. Although it was clear by the time he fixed his eye on Marth Wayles Skelton [his future wife] that trouble between Virginia and the mother country loomed on the horizon, he could not have imagined how the struggle would turn out and the role that he would play in it. Even without knowing that, he had every reason to believe in the brightness of his future. (Hemingses of Monticello, 95)

She lists characteristics sought for in every would-be college or graduate student and coupled with a sincere belief in a purposeful future makes such a student absolutely attractive. Yet when played out against the backdrop of a colonial world in which the trajectory of Jefferson’s greatness included the natural order of slavery, then the question of connection becomes acute. It is not a simple question of whether ambition breeds conceit, arrogance, chauvinism, and so forth. The question in America is much deeper than such a facile moral query. The question is whether we have in place educational ecologies strong enough, discerning enough, humble enough to turn ambition, brilliance, and industry toward not simply that nebulous idea of “the common good” but toward ways of life that resist using people for our self-edification or as utilities for our life-projects.

This is an urgent question given our lives in an America that consumes vast quantities of the world’s natural resources, pollutes on a massive scale, and facilitates a global financial system that can and often does adversely affected multiple economies and societies by our consumptive and economic practices. The issue here is how we overcome an imaginative practice to see the world from within a center-periphery, top-bottom frame such that the peoples of the world become simply responding subjects and objects for consumption. As a theologian and a seminary professor I have marvelous historic and contemporary voices that press me to see this problem and equally important that stands as a gracious stumbling block toward recreating the Jeffersonian trajectory – from great student to great leader and slave master. The fact that slavery ended does not mean that the Jeffersonian trajectory has ended, indeed, the truth is we are in a struggle in theological institutions, in colleges, and in universities to resists patterns of intellectual framing that deposits peoples of color, and indigenous peoples inside visions of utility for the privileged.

The way I know to undo the Jeffersonian trajectory, that is, to undo the easy slide from youthful power, privilege, and promise to educated and refined narcissist is to turn the sights of young people toward another image, of a suffering servant whose pedagogy for greatness announced a troubling reversal.

Mark 10:42-45 ⁴² So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. ⁴³ But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, ⁴⁴ and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. ⁴⁵ For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

This gospel text provides no easy answer. It does however open up a space inside of which we can bring a whole new set of questions not only to the politics of admission to institutions of higher education but also curriculums old and revered or new and celebrated regarding the aim of their education. Equally crucial, this text with its radical placement of greatness inside of service and service itself now defined by the body of Jesus presses on us in theological education the serious demand that we display how our educational ecologies tightly bind ambition, talent, and productivity to servant life in Jesus’s name. I fear that too many theological institutions yet live comfortably inside pedagogical trajectories more suited to create slave masters.

All educational programs are subject to their times. So Jefferson’s formation would inevitably reflect the sensibilities of slaveholding society. But the more decisive formation at stake here are the residual echoes of the slave master class yet at work in our educational formation processes, especially theological education. You can hear such echoes in perspectives that look out on the world paternalistically and in constant evaluation of other peoples’ abilities to express what we perceive as “the signs of civilization.” Jefferson himself shows us this sensibility in his comments on African intellectual ability in his Notes on the State of Virginia, where he exposes this evaluative imperialism:

Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet…” “[Ignatius Sancho] has approached nearer to merit in composition… [T]hough we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column.[i]

Yet more comprehensively, the residual of the slave master class shows itself in the insensitivity to the asymmetrical social order of things. For so many Christians in the world, Western Christianity forms the house they must live in and negotiate. Like the Hemingses with Jefferson, so too they must find a way forward, shaping their lives with some sense of integrity and independence, even though so much of their lives are profoundly determined by what happens in America and the other G8 countries.

How can an educational process woven inside western privilege, power, and promise thwart the affects of our asymmetrical social order and the insensitivity to the voices of those who have little leverage to affect any aspect of our ways of life, those who in fact more often than not stand in relation to us as servants? The gospel passage opens up to us a basic reversal that might guide our pedagogy. It suggests we form servants. Indeed if the insight of the passage where taken seriously then the statue that might adorn a campus like William and Mary, or maybe more appropriately, a seminary campus, would not be a statue of Jefferson, important though he be for the formation of America, but a statue of Sally Hemings.

Sally Hemings (Thomas Jefferson)

All the Presidents' Girls

2009

Oil on paper

50 x 40 cm

A statue of Sally Hemings would say something very different to a talented, ambitious, industrious first year student whether coming to college or seminary. It would be an invitation to begin discerning the complex life of a servant. It would open up the possibility of asking what does it mean to be in a world that you did not create but in which you must find love, joy, peace, and most importantly a sense of calling? It would immediately raise the thorny question of what does it mean to be in service to others, not by force, but by choice. Clearly, such a question would yield good healthy conversations about race, class, gender, sexuality, power, intimacy and so forth. Only with such an image in front of us and the questions it might generate may we actually have the kind of educational process that sets our sights beyond Thomas Jefferson.

[i] Cited in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking Word of the 18^th Century (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 12.

Grace and the Healthcare Debate

2009-09-16T08:00:00.004-04:00

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

“There But for the Grace of God Go I.” So said President Barack Obama during a recent “town hall meeting” on Saturday August 14, 2009. It was his response to the wrenching story told by Mr. Nathan Wilkes, who introduced him to the Coloradans that filled the auditorium to hear him hear and to have him answer questions about the healthcare bills that are winding their way through the Congress.

Mr. Wilkes’s story about his son, Thomas, who was diagnosed with severe hemophilia, put a human face on the healthcare debate. His story took the debate out of the realm of figures and stats and put it in the realm of real lives of pain and tragedy.

In introducing the President, Mr. Wilkes told of how one of the questions he and his spouse had to deal with after their son’s birth was the one put to them by their doctor: “Do you have good insurance?” The care their son required caused them to max out quickly on their insurance policy. Fighting back tears, Mr. Wilkes told the audience that he and his spouse were at one point counseled to consider divorcing so that their son could qualify for Medicaid.

It was after hearing this story that President Obama uttered the, in my opinion, fitting words, though they are words that unfortunately have become culturally clichéd: “There But for the Grace of God Go I . . .”

By invoking God’s grace in relationship to our country’s national debate on healthcare, Obama, whether it was his intention or not, has opened another window onto the healthcare issue. He’s suggesting a connection -- and as a theologian, I’d say a good one -- between the question of our moral obligations to one another in the question of healthcare and what it means to be recipients of God’s grace. “There but for the grace of God go I . . .” is connected, to use the language of ole’ King Jimmy, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The healthcare question in our country is not merely about running the numbers, though it certainly involves this. It is the question of grace, which is tied to the question of morality, the question of our moral duty and obligation to those we consider in the family of humanity.

What are our moral obligations to one another on the matter of healthcare? And how, as Christians, should we be thinking about such matters given our claim to be witnesses to the triumph of life, healing, and health over death and debilitation, a triumph that comes -- and this is grace -- from of Jesus’ wounded and scarred flesh?

What is needed at this time is a clearer Christian witness to our moral duties to be one another’s keepers, and thus a clearer Christian witness to grace.

District 9 and the Creation of the Alien

2009-09-14T08:00:00.009-04:00

By Dr. Brian Bantum
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

District 9 was undoubtedly a terrific movie. It’s plot was original and the story unfolded in both exciting and moving ways. I was enthralled from beginning to end. But something is just not sitting right. I get that the film depicts how societies refuse others and collectively ghettoize and render alien citizens who are different.

I get the whole “if you were in the shoes of the other person you might understand yourself a little better thing.”

But there is something that is keeping me from being really, really, really excited about this movie and the statements it could make about national belonging and otherness.

While the allegorical connection to the movie began with Johannesburg, the fact that these aliens really are aliens and not the people of the land raises a crucial difference in how the conception of difference functions within the movie itself. These creatures literally dropped from the sky. Of course there is going to be societal refusal. The condition the aliens would eventually be left to does well to visualize the practice of differentiation, but in many ways it clouds the processes of formation that creates differences. It is these processes of differentiation that create the spaces of the ghetto, the districts, the internment camps, etc. On the one hand the obvious difference of the aliens creates a helpful visualization of how difference is refused, but it confuses the reality of how difference is created.

The question of apartheid is not only the question of the camps, but of the creation of the conditions that would allow difference to be seen. It is a question of how those on the outside were deemed “natural” citizens. The fact that these aliens are SO different seems to play into the characterizations of difference that create these spaces in the first place. Sure, in many ways the director was trying to ask us the question, “who is really human?” But they so confused the point through a (correctly) muddled view of good/bad within each society that the only marker left was the visual to demarcate the citizen/alien.

It’s along this line that I am really not sure about this movie. The possibility of rendering a people who inhabit a land into aliens is the real miracle of the colonial project and that is the sin we have to reckon with. That we treat others who are different than us badly is obvious at this point. Sadly, the evidence is mounting exponentially. But the response to this must be more nuanced than simple decisions to stop doing it.

District 9 confronts us with the treatment of aliens and not the creation of aliens (or the creation of citizens.) I know movies aren’t supposed to be everything. I am thankful for a thoroughly thought-provoking film. At the same time I am always fearful of the ways such thought-provoking moments can problematically frame our view of the challenges before us.

Dr. Brain Bantum is Assistant Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington. He received his Ph.D. and Master of Theological Studies from Duke University. His first book Mulatto Theology will be published by Baylor University Press. For more thoughts and theology from Brian Bantum, check out his personal blog: http://brianbantum.wordpress.org

Prayer for the Nation

2009-09-11T08:00:00.008-04:00

By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
Pastor, Greenleaf Christian Church
President, North Carolina Conference, NAACP

Gracious eternal and all wise God. Thou who formed what is out of nothing, and called us into being to serve you. You, oh Lord, who weighs every nation in the balance of your own standards. Today, we acknowledge how great Thou art, the marvelous mystery of your mercy and exalt the excellence of your name.

Because your Holy Spirit brings all things to remembrance, breathe on us now, that we might remember how gracious you have been to this nation we call America. As a nation, we have our faith and frailties, strengths and shortcomings, yet you have allowed grace to be shed upon us. When we have honored your ways and when we have fallen short you have been a merciful God. Remind us that the history of this nation is more about your grace than about our greatness. When we are not where we should be, let us hear and follow what you said to Solomon, 2 Chronicles 7:14, "If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will I forgive their sin, and will I heal their land."

In our land we need healing, for a land so blessed by grace there is too much poverty, too much sickness, too many children dying, and too much war. We need a healing. Michael Bell and five others in Jena, or the three year unjust lock down of James Johnson in Wilson are but symbols of a justice system that needs healing. Katrina was more than a flood. It was a failure to protect the vulnerable and a metaphor of the wave of disenfranchise that flows in too many communities. We need a healing.

In your word you have said, he who rules the nation must be just and if we are to please you we must learn to do justice, care for the fatherless, support the widow, loose the bands of wickedness, pay people what they deserve, care for the sick, the homeless, and the hungry. To please you it must be said of us, “For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

Trouble the soul of this nation as you did in the days of Amos so that no one is at ease in Zion. Use our prophetic words and our prophetic actions to remind those in the seats of power that they are not God. Trouble this nation with the voice of concern and the voice of compassion. Make us mindful of the thousands without paths to the pursuit of happiness…

Shake the foundations of our conscious until we cannot help, but change our course. Move on us to study war no more. Cause us to live our lives to serve others. Teach us that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness requires justice and hope and help and caring. Expand our morality beyond the narrowness of personal piety into the broadness of public policy. Give us the strength to challenge racism, classicism, poverty, and uncheck militarism. Empower us with your Spirit that we might be a nation unto God, not unto fear; show us again that America is only here by your grace. Show us that grace carries responsibility. That a nation under grace must lead the world not merely police the world. A nation under grace must care, must remember her past so that she will not be arrogant in her present. A nation under grace must bring the world together and not tear it apart. A nation under grace cannot refer to people as aliens when we all were created with one blood. A nation under grace cannot leave cities decaying and flood victims barely surviving. Grace demands something better than that.

So Lord as you stirred up dry bones in the valley, stir up hope, and stir up righteousness. Restore the Prophets and the prophetic voices to the land. Revive the spirit of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Corretta, Harriet, Rosa, Cinque, Douglass, Dubois, Sojourner, Jordan, Wilkins and Bethune. Hold and sustain the Congressional Black Caucus whose seats are dipped in the blood of martyrs and were raised to be the conscience of this nation. Call us and challenge us again. Teach even this nation that even with all our power and all our resources we will still have to stand before your judgment one day. Give us leaders who understand that the purpose of power and influence is to help someone. Grant us a citizenry determine to be yoked together in common humanity. Let us know the only way to a more perfect union is for our laws and policies to reflect your kind of love. Let faith be a conviction not a convenience. Help us, Oh God, to smooth out every wrinkle in the flag of our community life until we are one nation under God, with one justice system for all, with living wages for all, with quality education for all. Finally, oh Lord we pray that the mind of the psalmist will be ours:

Psalm 66: 1-7

1Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands:

2Sing forth the honor of his name: make his praise glorious.

3Say unto God, How terrible art thou in thy works! through the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies submit themselves unto thee.

4All the earth shall worship thee, and shall sing unto thee; they shall sing to thy name. Selah.

5Come and see the works of God: He is terrible in His doing toward the children of men.

6He turned the sea into dry land: they went through the flood on foot: there did we rejoice in Him.

7He ruleth by His power for ever; His eyes behold the nations: let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah.

We thank you God that your eyes still behold the nation. We thank you God that you still see injustice, you still see poverty and because you can still see it, these things don't have the last word. We thank you God that you still see America. You still see our leadership. You know how to bring down the high and lift up the humble. O God we bless your name, we lift up every voice, we declare and rejoice that you are still the God of our weary years, the God who is able to bring life out of death. Help us to know like our foreparents sung, ‘Time is filled with swift transition, naught of earth unmoved can stand, Build your hope on things eternal, Hold to God’s unchanging hand.” In the name of the Father who sticketh closer than a brother, watches us like a mother, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. AMEN.

A Teachable Moment

2009-09-09T08:00:00.004-04:00

By Dr. Mary McClintock Fulkerson
Professor of Theology
Duke Divinity School

It would be wonderful if the recent furor over President Obama’s comments criticizing the white police officer’s treatment of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates proved to be a true “teaching moment.” While it is impossible to keep up with the constantly shifting version of reality offered by the news media on such things, at least two themes implicit in this story beg for theological reflection. First, why is “race” always attributed to minority populations and, secondly, why should Obama be criticized for getting “off track”---for not talking about “all of the American people” as one commentator put it---if he brings up race? These themes are connected and have significance for the church.

Race in the U.S. is similar to gender. Both are markers of identity typically associated with a particular group, in the first case, people of color, in the second, women. Think of the presidential election press coverage---only Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin had “gender;” only Barak Obama had “race.” This assumes that only white men have no identity markers, e.g., are simply normal human beings without interests shaped by social location. Now having “race” or “gender” does not indicate “minority” in the numerical sense---women frequently outnumber males, especially in churches. No, the “marked” vs. “unmarked” designation is about power: being “unmarked” has to do with dominance; being “marked” indicates that a group has in some sense been historically marginalized.

Theologically speaking, why isn’t historical marginalization, or being “marked,” a concern of everyone? Why is race only an “issue” for African Americans, or others designated as persons of color? Why is “whiteness” -- my race and its attendant privileges--- typically hidden and rarely if ever acknowledged? Why do we continue to engage in what race theorists like Ruth Frankenberg calls “dodging difference” or “color evasion”? Why do we whites continue to think things are fine-- we don’t see color-- when, in fact, “colorblindness,” as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva puts it, is the new form of racism? Our egregious racial history still shapes our society; we cannot act as if things like racial profiling are only the problems of “minority” groups. Our country is in desperate need of discourse of the common good, so that when Obama raises issues of race he is respected and appreciated, not lambasted for playing the “race card.” Although complicated, messy, and scary (especially for whites), these are crucial issues for “all of the American people.”

In this “teachable moment,” public discourse could surely learn from the church. As it seeks to follow Jesus, the church replaces “individualism” with stories and faith practices around grace-filled community and concern for the “outsider.” However, most white churches have a great deal in common with the culture of color evasion. Only 2.5% of mainline churches have significantly interracial membership; evangelical churches do only slightly better with 6%. We may not be individualistic, but how often are “community” and eucharist gatherings with folks just like us? Our challenge: let this be a “teachable moment” for the church. Let us face one another across deep racial and other divides in sustained and grace-filled honesty. Let us do “welcoming community” with less color-blindness. Is talking about our different experiences with regard to race and the implications of racial difference for our lives difficult and scary? You bet; that’s why many of us don’t do it. But incarnation is by definition messy and worldly.

A White Girl Like Me

2009-08-31T12:25:00.002-04:00

By Dr. Amy Laura Hall
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Duke Divinity School

I am a woman. But this long story very short begins when I was a girl, a white girl. I was raised with an inkling of a clue, but protected from gaining more.

There was a hint that beloved neighbors didn’t have an easy time as a “mixed” couple in small town Texas. But it wasn’t until much later that I had the categories to get this. There were evidently open conflicts in my extended family over “mixed” dating, but the sketches are almost erased by hush now, one of the elders involved too-long-gone and venerated.

A few stories stick. In one, I am a mostly clueless 13 year old, in a rental van, traveling to Arkansas for a youth conference. I can’t remember now if we were all white kids, but we were definitely mostly so. One woman in charge was mostly Black. We stopped for gas in a trifling town. We piled out of the car with our carefully pre-teen selected Ocean Pacific t-shirts, sunglasses, and knowing sneers. (Looking back, this is absurd, as we were small town kids ourselves.) I laughed out “Hey, Girls! Look at all the hicks!” Claudia stopped me, brought me around the other side of the van and “clued me in.” Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how much trouble you could get us all into? Do you think a Black woman with a van full of white kids drives through here every day?

I like to think now that I was responding to some ghastly display of the confederate flag, but, I’m probably wishful thinking, and clueless thinking. Because that wasn’t the point. The point was that I had the freedom to display mock-superiority. I could opt in or out of having a clue. Claudia couldn’t.

This may be what scared me most about Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Most other novels I had read allowed me to opt in or out, trying on different moral masks. Good old Atticus. I could be Scout. Huck? Probably not. Toni Morrison does not make it easy to “try on” brown eyes. She later wrote that “many readers were touched but not moved.” I think I was tripped off kilter. Every time I put the book down, Toni Morrison had made it woundingly obvious that I was able to put the book down.

Director Kiri Davis didn’t make her film, “A Girl Like Me,” for girls like me. A student recommended I use it in teaching. Maybe she also wanted to help me get a clue. I sat there in my Duke office with tears of angry lament. Two students knocked on the door. I was caught crying, even sobbing, by two white boys. Good white boys, but, still, sobbing isn’t done. I said later to a friend, “That is it. No more. I am happy being white. I don’t want to be this angry. I don’t want to be so cursedly moved. Forget about it.”

Here’s the thing that made me write. This stuff is annoying on all fronts. Black people still know I have about a quarter of a clue most of the time. As the only white girl in Emory’s Voices of Inner Strength, as the white teacher who tries to teach Womanist texts, as the professor who weeps in lament, I opt in or out as I want, as the “spirit moves.” But I am learning that a white person with a bit of a clue is even more annoying to most white people. What is up with her? Mid-life crisis? Desperation for friendship? Too many sociology classes at a young age? (Or, my favorite, a particularly cruel reference to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.) Why does she always have to bring up race? She is not Black.

True. I’m not Black. But I am part of a Body that is. Some day Christians will all be opted in.

The Memorial for Michael Jackson

2009-08-28T12:30:00.000-04:00

By Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Jennings: Jay, I was amazed by the memorial service for Michael Jackson. What struck me immediately was the deeply Christian, deeply “black church form” that service embodied. From the surprising presence and position of the casket adorned with flowers to the position of the podium, the setting turned the Staples Center in Los Angeles into a sanctuary. Yet beyond the setting, we saw the performance of an ecclesial memory of how to mourn the dead and how to draw the dead bodies of black men next to the body of God. This is a practice black Christians the world over know how to do very well, not because we want such knowledge but because we have been forced into its endless repetition. I was struck by how the singers such as Mariah Carey and Lionel Richie drew deeply from the well of church singing, that blues drenched, old 100s idiom. But the first highlight for me was Queen Latifah's reading of Maya Angelou brilliant poem:

Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing,
now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind.

Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace.
Sing our songs among the stars
and walk our dances across the face of the moon.

In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing.

No clocks can tell time.

No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure.

Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone.

Only when we confess our confusion can we remember that he was a gift to us
and we did have him.

He came to us from the creator, trailing creativity in abundance.

Despite the anguish, his life was sheathed in mother love, family love,
and survived and did more than that.

He thrived with passion and compassion, humor and style.

We had him whether we know who he was or did not know, he was ours and and we were his.

We had him, beautiful, delighting our eyes.

His hat, aslant over his brow, and took a pose on his toes for all of us.

And we laughed and stomped our feet for him.

We were enchanted with his passion because he held nothing.
He gave us all he had been given.

Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ghana’s Black Star Square.

In Johannesburg and Pittsburgh, in Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England
We are missing Michael.

But we do know we had him, and we are the world.

Angelou's genius was beautifully framed by the powerful commanding presence of Queen Latifah. Angelou's stunning biblical cadence captures one of the deepest realities of black artistic performance as we witnessed it in Michael Jackson, and that is, the ability to carry others inside our bodies, inside our pain and inside our expressive transcendence.

Carter: Yes Willie, your observations are spot-on. The Jackson memorial service calls for serious intellectual, I would go so far as to say, Christian intellectual reflection. For indeed, as again you rightly say, the service mimed in many ways signal features of black church life, so much so that the Staples Center metamorphosed into the Staples Sanctuary. It was replete with soloists and choirs, testimonials and witnesses, and alas preacher and all ─ in the person of Al Sharpton as eulogist.

Sharpton’s remarks roused the crowd and raised the roof. There was his homiletically polished line: “To the Jackson kids I say, there was nothin’ strange about your dad; it was strange what yo’ daddy had to deal with.” And there was the ever-so subtle alignment of MJ’s life with the wider strides of the civil rights movement and with Martin Luther King, Jr. Some, I’m sure may feel that such a suggestion goes too far. But Sharpton as preacher at Staples Sanctuary was making a point certainly worth pondering.

Martin and Michael, Sharpton intimated, were “dreamers ─ dreamers of a different social world, a different social reality. King dreamed in the heat of the 1950s and 1960s. His dream bore its greatest fruit in the world of politics and policy with the great Civil Rights legislations. Jackson dreamed in the soul and then post-soul eras of the 1970s, 80s, and beyond. The fruit of his dream was the transformation of the world of artistic and musical culture. Linking the two eras and the two figures as he did ─ and here Sharpton’s rhetorical gifts and genius piqued in its subtlety ─ was the “dream.” Both dreamed ─ as has Afro-Christianity the world over ─ a different world in the midst of this strange world. Invoking black church life as the form in which to funeralize Michael Jackson powerfully evoked this deeper and wide tradition of black folks in the modern world.

It also struck me, Willie, that something else was accomplished in memorializing Michael Jackson in black church form. It profoundly humanized him in the midst of media narratives in which Michael often came off as freakish or that otherwise put a question mark next to his humanity. Well, true to black church form, the memorial service ─ from the cracking voice of Jermaine Jackson to the funny anecdotes of Smokey Robinson to Brook Shields’ tears to the groans of Jackson’s little daughter Paris ─ captured a Michael Jackson. Michael the human being ─ the father, the friend, the humanitarian, someone who gave almost a third of his income to do good works. And insofar as the memorial service humanized Michael, it followed in the tradition of black churches the world. It humanizes those who have had a question mark placed next to their humanity, calling it into question. Between the media presentation of Michael Jackson and the memorial presentation of him in black church form, we see a struggle of narration, the wages of story telling. It does remind one of King again, for the March on Washington also narrated civil rights inside of the form of the black church.

One last thing. And here I am thinking of the universality of Jackson the man and the universality of his memorial service. As Jackson was a black man who was a figure of universal reach (his voice brought together those from Japan to Birmingham, from Senegal and Berlin to Brazil, from Britain to the Bronx), the black church form in which he was memorialized also exemplified the universal reach of black church life. Michael Jackson (along with Lionel Richie) penned in the 1980s, I think it was, “We are the World.” Well, people the world over, numbering in the millions, watched his memorial service. But here’s the thing: as they watched it, they were drawn into the form and into the bosom of the pain and hope of the black church tradition at its best.

In all, the memorial, as I said, leaves much for us to think about and talk through.

Jennings: Jay, absolutely, in a very important way Michael’s memorial service flashed across the world the humanizing power of black church gestures. Once again, I am deeply impressed by the truth and power of Sharpton. He is also a figure like Michael often inscribed in narrative that render him freakish, fiendish or an abject political failure. None of which are true, but all of which seeks to conceal the profoundly organic power of the man. As with James Brown, the godfather of soul, so too now with the king of pop, Sharpton’s close relationship with these men and his ability to contextualize their lives on the broader landscapes of America’s story and the story of global black existence has placed Sharpton in a unique historic space.

That space is indeed a preaching space. I was amazed at his deployment of the preacher refrain, “Thank ya,” “Thank ya, Michael.” We are quite familiar with this refrain as carrying forward the celebratory climax of a sermon, evoking the work of God bound up with a dying and rising Son. Yet here Sharpton drew Michael’s life inside this majestic sigh of Christian gratitude. I never cease to be stunned by the creative power of black preachers to expand a Christological frame around any and every moment of pain.

Speaking of pain, I was also struck by the labored singing of so many of the performers. I cannot imagine what it must be like to enter the expressive mode while the pain of loss is so fresh. You could see the struggle on Lionel Richie’s face as he tried to sing his beautiful song, Jesus. You could also see it on Usher, and of course, Jermaine’s sensitive singing. Even Stevie Wonder’s poignant performance was labored as he pressed through the sadness soaked moment. My point here is that their performances exposed the clear sense that this is an untimely death, a death that should not be.

Teaching Theology Isn’t Like Teaching History?

2009-08-26T18:00:00.001-04:00

By Dr. Brian Bantum
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

In my undergraduate creative writing courses my professors were concerned with cultivating my skills of expression and observation. These were evaluated not on the basis of my knowledge of Morrison or Faulkner or how they drew upon philosophy or critical theory. My knowledge of Faulkner and Morrison were displayed in the incorporation of them in my descriptions, in my prose. During this time I learned that I needed to display my intent, not explain my intent. I needed to move the reader into sympathy, not explain why this character should have sympathy. In my moments of political fervor and explicit idealism the comments were simple: do not tell, show.

As I think about my own preparations as a teacher and as a scholar, I look at the faces of real students for whom I have sole responsibility. I am somewhat struck by how ill-prepared I am to train them to be theologians, to express their lives with God in the world, and how well equipped I am to be describe other people’s descriptions of God.

In my best moments, I hope my own writing and scholarship displays who God might be in the world and who we might be in relation to the one who loves us. But this is sometimes at odds with my own training in graduate school and the demands of my guild. The training of a graduate student is the formation of a teller, an explainer, a scholar of scholars. Scholarly work is the evaluation of texts.

Do not mistake what I am saying. We need those descriptions of other’s descriptions. We need folks to show us the patterns of thought and practice over time. This is part of my vocation and calling. But is this the goal? Is this what I want my students to become? What would it mean to see them as poets? To ask them to develop the eye of writers, observing patterns and details in the most unexpected places? To hope to cultivate in them the possibility witness, whether through words or forms of life, displaying God in the world in such a way that it cuts us and reveals to us who we truly are?

I am now beginning to realize the challenge of teaching theology is not in establishing the relevance of my subject within an array of subjects and disciplines. Writing and reflecting on a syllabus, settling on a set of terms to master is easy. But I suspect theology is more than this. Teaching theology is about cultivating the practice of theology. It is about participating in the formation of students who can begin to see God’s call upon them and movement in the world, and artfully display these perceptions in their own life (and hopefully their own writing!) In part, theology might be about ensuring a proper understanding of historical moments and the progression of thought in the Christian tradition. But what if we imagine our vocation as something closer to our colleagues in creative writing where our goal is not to form knowers, but poets?

I don’t know if my teaching will do this. I hope it will. But I am sure that it is a whole lot harder than what I was trained to do.

Dr. Bantum received his PhD and Master of Theological Studies degree from Duke University. His first book “Mulatto Theology” will be published by Baylor University Press.

Slavery in Africa’s Past: Some Tentative Thoughts on Its Christian Shame and Glory

2009-08-12T13:00:00.000-04:00

By Dr. Esther Acolatse
Assistant Research Professor
of Pastoral Theology and Global Christianity
Duke Divinity School

Recently President Obama and his family visited Ghana and like all African Americans before them took a pilgrimage to a former slave castle in Cape Coast. Though I recall not only his words but the expressions on his face, what struck me most was the demeanor of Sasha Obama. She peered through the hole in the wall through which slaves were tunneled to the dungeon, averted her eyes, and began twisting the hem of her blouse as she looked up at her father. Obvious signs of discomfiture, but tinged with what seemed like embarrassment. But why?

I’m probably the only Ghanaian who’s made the trip to the slave castles, even taken touring groups and has waited outside as they retraced the steps of former slaves, waited in the damp, dark dingy dungeons and came out through the now famous “door of no return.” Perhaps one day when I’m old enough I may have the courage to go through the place without the visceral responses that I have experienced in the past. I’m trusting my body not to recall where it has been before – in the loins of some forebear who’s walked that mile. And no one can tell me such things are not possible, especially people who’ve built a religion around an Adam and Eve and a “Fall.”

Back to the discomfiture and embarrassment I sensed in Sasha’s expression. Our people say that before the stranger dips his fingers into the communal pot, a villager must have shown him the way. Of course Africa had its form of slavery before colonial times, but it was nothing like what pertained before the emancipation bills and its aftermath. The closest inhumanity then was the 7th century Arab raids of sub-Saharan Africa in which slaves were transported to parts of Asia, and the documented female shrine slaves in parts of west Africa. Otherwise the common form of slavery known in traditional times was the kind that increased land ownership for the master. This is because the concept of individual land ownership was unknown in Africa. Land was distributed according to the need of the family for farming and domicile. The more people one had to farm a land the more land one could receive. Raiding neighboring villages for slaves, usually of other ethnicities, was not unusual for the wealthy and powerful. But usually the slave became integrated into the family with the opportunity to wealth as well as rise in military rank during war if he fought.

In the case of slavery on the coastline of Africa, sheer selfish greed and avarice from two unlikely sources colluded. The economic crisis which plagued Europe in the 14th century sent the Portuguese who had mastered the art of navigation on high seas to search for resources in distant Africa. They landed on the coastline of West Africa and raided it of its gold and ivory, naming present-day Ghana the Gold Coast, and the Ivory Coast was named so for its wealth in ivory. What tipped the scales was that the Europeans, who also brought with them religion, particularly the English Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries who established themselves as the biggest Christian denominations on these shores, discovered not only converts but cheap labor. The chiefs on the coast were more than willing to pay in slaves for rum and gin. Today, the Ghana House of Chiefs ─ a body comprising all the country's traditional kings and chiefs ─ has placed a plaque on one of the castle's walls, asking for forgiveness.

Perhaps the reason I’m unable to enter and retrace the steps of slavery is because I share a double heritage of guilt and shame ─ an African from Ghana and a Presbyterian Christian (I’m still working out which identifier takes priority). I find I still have only tentative answers for the questions raised by the atrocities of slavery and Christian??? complicity in it. How is a church atop a dungeon that houses human beings to whom a liberating gospel has been preached possible? How does one worship the God of all peoples ─ according to the Bible brought by these same missionaries ─ and treat them inhumanely? How does one sing and pray and preach at least on Sunday mornings and go buy human beings and dehumanize them, rape and torture their women the rest of the week, and many times immediately following worship? More to the point, what must it have felt like for these bound and chained humans to hear singing and praise in honor of a god of love?

If the gospel indeed has the power not only to free from sin but give power to overcome sin because of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, then it is fair to assume that chapel or no chapel these were in no way Christians. Products of Christendom perhaps, but not those who have been confronted with the claims of Christ and given accent to them, and turned their lives over and asked that they be continually transformed.

Most missional religious traditions have their own history of compromise with political power and privilege, and of complicity in violence that has marred human history. My own tradition, Christianity, for instance, has been, on the one hand, a force that brought the message of God's unconditional love for and acceptance of all people. On the other hand, its history, sadly, is also marked by crusades, insensitivity to Indigenous cultures, and complicity with imperial and colonial designs including slavery and its attendant effects to date.

Such ambiguity and compromise with power and privilege continues to be part of our Christian heritage and shows up in places where discrimination in any form goes unnoticed, unchallenged and unchecked. All the places and times when we “gain the world and lose our souls” individually or corporately we make the gospel ineffectual. In light of the history of slavery, it is to our shame and to God’s glory that there are African Christians both at home and in the Diaspora. We see resplendent, the power of the gospel to transcend borders and transmitters and recipients. The gospel had full effect only in places of confession and repentance and desire for restitution. These are always the seeds and fruit of forgiveness. It is more than time for these to occur. Various trips to Elmina or Cape Coast castles may be therapeutic and cathartic, but we need a more enduring ritual that translates into flourishing for all.

Gifts from Tiffney

2009-08-10T15:30:00.001-04:00

By Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

The Rev. Tiffney Marley, MDiv ’96, rendered years of honorable service to the Office of Black Church Studies (OBCS) and the Divinity School, and we are greatly indebted to her. She stepped down from the directorship of the office after spring semester 2009.

I remember when Duke Divinity School Dean Greg Jones and I recruited Tiffney away from an administrative post in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke and back to the Divinity School in 2003. She served as the first non-faculty, full-time administrator of the OBCS, and under her leadership every aspect of the office improved.

Not only did Tiffney help us achieve new heights of administrative coherence, but she deepened and expanded our already strong network of relationships with the black communities in Durham, the Triangle and the Piedmont. She also strengthened our ties with our alumni through multiple efforts including establishing a regular presence for the Divinity School at the important Hampton Minister’s Conference. Tiffney also helped strengthen the school’s international ties in Peru, Haiti, Brazil and multiples places on the African continent. She was the glue that held together our pilgrimage programs, whether in Brazil, South Africa, Uganda, Durham or anywhere in between. Tiffney brought top-flight organization, joyful enthusiasm, creative energy, and unrelenting effort to each and every pilgrimage.

Scores of students rightly appreciate Tiffney’s efforts to increase field education opportunities in historical black churches and church-related organizations. All seminarians but especially black seminarians had in Tiffney an unfailing advocate and supporter in their theological formation. She also was the best host for the Divinity School’s annual Gardner Taylor and Martin Luther King, Jr. lecture series. Our distinguished guests, as well as academic and administrative colleagues from other institutions, repeatedly remarked to me how helpful Tiffney was to them. I often heard the words “first-class,” top-notch,” “professional,” and “classy” connected to Tiffney’s name. In addition to this wonderful work, during several years Tiffney served with me on the Duke University-wide MLK celebration committee, taking on even more tasks and carrying them out with superb efficiency.

I was especially pleased with what Tiffney modeled for students daily, a woman of color in ministry who was, to quote a famous preacher, “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.” Tiffney understood the dignity that flows from the rich legacy of black Christian existence in the world, and she unrelentingly bore witness to that dignity in every meeting, every conversation and in her every administrative gesture.

As my esteemed colleague Professor W.C. Turner often said to me, “Tiffney is an African princess that has come among us.” Princess indeed, but she was not royalty spared all indignities or crowns of thorns. Tiffney had to face what many woman of color in ministry have to face every day − frequent times of resistance to their leadership rooted in chauvinism, sexism and racism. One of the continuing tragedies of church life in the west (and especially in America and in black America) is the refusal to receive fully the gifted leadership of women, especially young black women. In her time at the Divinity School, Tiffney worked to turn that tragedy into triumph. We are a better place because she often graciously, but always tirelessly, tried.

During my years as academic dean, I could not have asked for nor received a better co-laborer in caring for students. Academic deans are the bearers of secrets. So I know the students that really brought her great joy, and the ones who poured sorrow into her soul. Yet what Tiffney gave them far outweighed what they gave her. She loved them, everyday, she loved them.

Stony Roads

Stony Roads has a New Home

The Last Words of Jesus: A Joint Reflection

The Last Words of Jesus: GODFORSAKEN

The Last Words of Jesus: AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

The Last Words of Jesus: I THIRST

Health Spot: Healthcare Reform, Obesity and the Church

The Real Blind Side

A Sense of History

Health Spot: Thinking About Healthcare

Events: Triumph & Truth

Celebrating 40 Years of the Black Seminarians Unionat Duke Divinity School

Feb. 8-10, 2010Duke Divinity School

Schedule of Events

Monday, Feb. 8, 2010

Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010

Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2010

Health Spot: New Year, New You?

Why, Lord? Haiti and the God-Question

Praying for Haiti

Stony Roads

21st Century Courage

Michelle Obama and the Black Madonna

Mary, Did You Know?

A Black Princess

Anticipation: A Hope For The Present

In His Arms, So Many Prayers ... So Many Prayers Rest

Precious, Take Our Hand

On the Significance of Pauli Murray (Part I)

Happy Birthday, Pauli!

PAULI MURRAY LECTURE WITH

DR. BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL

PAULI MURRAY BIRTHDAY PARTY

Events Free and Open to the Public Community, Family Life and Recreation Center at Lyon Park, 1313 Halley Street at Kent Street

Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" and the Future of Theology: The Order of Disorder and the Politics of Confusion

When the Spirit says sing ...

A Cup In Common?

A Recession-Proof Gospel?

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Why Obama Can't Win When He Wins

Who's Coming to Dinner?

Undoing Jefferson: Moral Education and Theological Formation

Grace and the Healthcare Debate

District 9 and the Creation of the Alien

Prayer for the Nation

A Teachable Moment

A White Girl Like Me

The Memorial for Michael Jackson

Teaching Theology Isn’t Like Teaching History?

Slavery in Africa’s Past: Some Tentative Thoughts on Its Christian Shame and Glory

Gifts from Tiffney

Celebrating 40 Years of the Black Seminarians Union
at Duke Divinity School

Feb. 8-10, 2010
Duke Divinity School