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

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 status’ 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.

 

On My First Week of Teaching – A Practice of Patience (and exhaustion)

My first week of teaching was frankly exhausting. Many a faculty and post-first year colleagues told me it was going to be this way. I believed them, but then classes started.

I have gleaned two things about teaching from the first week of classes. Exhaustion comes from unexpected places and teaching is a practice of patience.

Exhaustion

In a new university with professors I do not know, with a curriculum I am still learning, and students I know very little about, teaching as an exercise in learning has taken on new meaning. The constant mental energy in learning names, looking at faces and trying to figure out if that stare is attentiveness or boredom is draining. Thinking about lectures for tomorrow and how those relate to what I thought I was going to do next week and realizing I didn’t come up with enough material for an hour and twenty minutes all serves to make for an exciting week.

In a way I probably knew all of this. I was fairly prepared that I was not prepared. But one thing I was not prepared for was the influx of information and the energy required to filter through all of it. Naively, I thought that this job was more of what I was doing as a grad student, thinking, writing, teaching. But what has really caught me off guard is the sheer amount of information I find myself filtering through everyday. E-mails from facnet, conversations among colleagues, possibilities of new books, questions about curriculum seem to surround me.

Coming in I was told, “don’t get involved with the inner politics too quickly.” So that was my plan, I was just going to sit back and let other people fight it out while I focused on my classes and getting my dang book done. But what I have found is that it is not that easy, because I actually have opinions about some of these things. Some of the issues are issues that actually have something to do with my future at this institution and will be a lot more work to insert myself into in a year or two. So perhaps I should just say a little bit right now.

But even more than actually having the conversation is the mental energy required to think about whether I should have the conversation, send the e-mail, look at that book somebody suggested. The process of just filtering the information is what I have found to be the most exhausting aspect of my first week. I am sure it will only be a matter of time until I become more adept at this process, but this was honestly the most unexpected and most tiring part of my first teaching experience.

Patience

As I suggested earlier, I think I am a pretty good teacher. I taught classes on my own was teaching assistant for A LOT of classes in grad school. While there I had the privilege of learning from some folks who I consider master teachers. But what I came to find in teaching my own semester (or quarter) long courses as opposed to summer courses was that a great deal of patience is required. I don’t mean patience for annoying students. My students have been really wonderful. What I found is that teaching my own course required me to be slow in making my point. I am coming to find that in order for the students to truly learn I need to let the course unfold. The structure of the course has to be pedagogical, informative, transformative.

This is a bit of a change for me because as a TA I was guiding students through another person’a land, so to speak. I was helping them learn the ebbs and flow, the patterns and indigenous life. I was a mountain guide whose responsibility it was to help students find their way and in doing so there were moments when I would need to etch out a foothold, or make explicit a path, point out what was important so they wouldn’t miss it next time. I learned a lot of important skills (the power of analogies and illustrations, to name two) in doing this and I think the idea of students learning through the unfolding of a class became embedded in the structure of my syllabi.

But what I found was that I was trying to be a TA to my own class. I was trying to tell students the significance of a point rather than guide them to it. Rather than being a guide in another person’s land, I had to help these students become at home in my land. This, I have come to find, requires a great deal of patience. Instead of answering the question, we read through the text. Instead of pointing to what will be said in three weeks, I am letting questions lay for a week or so to let the readings lead the student into a possible answer to their question.

For a person who became adept at guiding folks through other people’s land it is a strange thing to leave a question unanswered, to be patient and trust the structure of the course and the readings. So I am learning patience in this process. I am learning to trust my students and trust the work that I have put in to crafting the course. The prospect of allowing this process to unfold has become somewhat freeing because I know the questions will be answered in time and this process is important for the student’s development. Of course knowing the process works and restraining myself from “oversteering” has been the distinct challenge of my first week teaching.

I am sure there is a sermon or spiritual lesson in there somewhere, but I am just too tired to tease it out right now…

 

Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and the Future of Theology

Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”:The Order of Disorder and the Politics of Confusion

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.

 

Race Is and Race Isn’t… Thinking Out Loud.

Once again the question of race has become a central topic of conversation in the media and in everyday conversation this time centered on President Jimmy Carter’s accustion towards Congressman Joe Wilson. And inevitably we have been drawn into the whirlpool of accusations and counter accusations, cries of “racist” and “I love all people, how dare you call me a racist.”

Can we please begin to have an honest discussion about race? In order to have an honest conversation about race we have to begin by entering into a reasonable understanding of how behaviors are related to self-understanding and perceptions of others. Secondly, it is also important to honor those who have endured the violence of racist individuals, groups and regimes throughout our history.

First, someone shouting in the middle of a national speech does not provide immediate evidence about whether or not someone is actively resisting the presence of particular people in their town, state, or nation. Having been a teaching assistant for over 30 classes over seven years in graduate school I found a difference in the deference of students to some teachers. Certain white male professors would give their lectures and afterwards I would hear complaints about their assignments or their methods and more rarely their content. In similar classes taught by non-white or female faculty I was amazed at the willingness of some students to openly question the professor’s pedagogy, methods, or resources. They would do this not in private, but in front of the class.

What is it in these moments that allows these students to feel free to resist, speak out, or question some professors but defer to others even if they disagree?

I am not saying these students who defied are racist or sexist. The point is they are willing to defer to some and they are, for some reason, willing to be vocal about their disagreement with others. We need to be cognizant of this tendency in order to really begin to dialogue about how minorities and women are so often dismissed in public conversation not because of vehement denials, but through a more subtle lack of deference or respect.

This lack of deference is part of a larger process of social formation that we are subjected to in this country (and the West as well) through a complicated set of real-life relationships, media, and lack of varied teachers and examples in our lives. If we are really begin to talk about race honestly in this country we must ask ourselves why some might feel the authority to do something like shout “you lie” to the president of the United States in a national speech.

Second, perhaps we should begin be more precise in how we use our language of racists vs. not racist. All of us live out of a certain view of differences (race included) but does this make us racists? Racists use their power (however little or however much) to actively prevent those different from them from entering into particular spheres of participation. This is not an official definition but something that I think becomes clear in the patterns of racial interaction throughout the United States. There are some who actively used their privilege in order to resist the presence of others or assert their superiority. This can happen in small ways or in larger ways. But I think what separates a racist from someone who operates out of their racialization is the overt violence of the moment that is connected to the power they can actually exert over another person.

To overuse the language of racist also diminishes the legacy of those martyrs who died at the hands of such vehement and direct racism. There are those in our present and past who endured the direct and unquestioned violence of others who used their power or acted out of their self-perceived privilege to not-hire, to beat up, to drag a person behind a truck, to lynch, to rape.

There are many in this country that continue to endure the violence of racists. To simply call everyone who refuses to defer a racist diminishes the power of the word and the courage of those who resist such people.

I am sure President Carter understood the power of the word he was using. A man of his diplomatic skill I am sure does not use words like racist flippantly. After all of the public service Carter has provided this country, the many joint sessions of congress he has spoken to and attended, I think Carter understood quite well what he was saying because he has seen countless sessions and countless acts of deference despite vehement disagreement so this particular moment must have struck him in a certain way. As a child of the South, I think Carter also understood the tone and mentalitiy of a fellow Southerner and recognized something that struck a particular chord in Carter. Because of this I tend to think that Carter’s words were probably accurate and measured, but sadly also can only be heard within the overwhelming echo of the misuse of the accusation which only serves to drown out the voices that are speaking truthfully about what they see or have endured.

For the sake of our conversations and our national community (but particularly the church), for the sake of those who have endured the violence of racial exclusion or differentiation, for the possibility of clearly seeing the tragedies and variations of tragedies, we must become clearer about our language. To fail to do so is to not only miss an opportunity for reconciliation, but to further silence the voices that are speaking truthfully about the pain they endured.

Lastly, the language of racist vs. not racist pulls us into a polarity of guilty vs not guilty, need to change vs. okay as I am that belies the reality that we are all guilty in one way or another, we all participate in this lack of deference, this system of race that implicates us all. We need to be honest about ourselves.

 

It’s a Whole New World – Middle School Purgatory

We took our oldest son to the first day of middle school this morning. In the midst of the heavy doses of cologne, the blur of girl-packs racing to and fro I could only look at my oldest and his wide eyes, neither of us quite ready for this sudden plunge into a new world.

But looking at all of those other kids I began to realize that some of them knew they weren’t ready either. They shared my son’s same wide eyes. Others who seemed so confident with their friends weren’t much farther along, in reality they simply didn’t realize they weren’t ready yet.

As much as my stomach is turning in knots waiting for him to come home with (prayerfully) a good report, I am also reminded that it is these shocking, sometimes terrifying reminders of a seemingly foreign world that so often serve to constitute our personhood, our lives. While scary, I have to admit I am glad he knows he’s not ready, that he knows he will have to depend on some strangers to get through the day.

Maybe this is a better place than the delusion of self-sufficiency, independence, a wicked familiarity with the world that allows us to believe we do not need those who occupy it. I think this is perhaps why middle school is one of the best metaphors for our Christian life. So often we think of our life as simply a space of survival and this is a bad thing. But is it so bad to know we don’t know?

I am not sure if I was ever more scared than going to middle school and I am not sure I ever really got used to it. I was a stranger in a foreign land. This is middle school. This is the Christian life. Of course, this life (prayerfully) doesn’t remain like it did on the first day, lonely, wide-eyed, and hoping for someone to talk to. Hopefully, we get to share the strangeness with others, but I don’t think it ever loses its foreigness.

I doubt my son will make such grand connections upon the conclusion of his first day. He will be happy if he opened his locker the first time and managed to not get lost. And that is enough. I don’t have the heart to tell him his whole life should look like this. Hopefully, he will find some friends, hopefully he will find solace in the band Christian brothers and sisters he sees at church and through these people he will slowly come to see that there is a loving God in the midst of this strange land with whom he can share his life and serve even when he feels alone.

Middle school is not fun, but it is instructive. But more importantly its name,  middle, is imbued with hope because it is only a series moments in a long and wonderful story.

 

What did I Just Say? Strange Tongues in Strange Places

Holy surprises are scary sometimes. God’s presence is really scary sometimes. About two months ago my family and I moved to Seattle, WA from Durham, NC. My wife and I graduated from Duke University, I had a great job in a great city, we had a great move across the country. Life was good.

When we got here I quickly realized I wasn’t in Durham anymore, my closest friends and mentors were not here. Our stuff wasn’t here. This was not a terrible situation in the grand scheme of things and I am a little embarrassed to admit it, but there it is. I don’t do change well. But on top of this culture shock our rental welcomed us with a collapsed sewage line that greeted us two successive mornings with someone else’s insides all over our bathroom (toilet, tub, sink, floor – it took Gail three days and two gallons of clorox down the drain before she would take a shower in that tub).

At 5 am on Sunday morning, cleaning up the bathroom I could only think of one thing. I had to go to church. This wasn’t one of those moments of intellectual, disciplined obedience. I was not singing psalms reminding myself that God was my provider. I had to go to the church like I had to eat. I had to go to church like I had not had a drop to drink in weeks. I was parched, starved, desperate in a way I did not know I could be.

So off we went to the only church we only knew anything about and 10 minutes into worship I had nothing left to resist with. I had no semblance of control. I could only weep. Not those nice manly tears that fall slowly down a chiseled and resolute face. No, these were tears mixed with snot and sniffing and more than my one tissue could absorb. In those moments I felt myself a stranger in a strange land and was succumbing to this strangeness, abandoning my presuppositions of control but also being comforted in ways I had not know before.

And then it happened…

I was just singing, or trying to sing between the sniffs and snorts, trying to be subtle (read: not be a total freak) in the midst of folks who I had never met before, when my tongue began to shake and stutter. It started slowly, but then became so pronounced that I had to cover my mouth with my hand to not disturb the nice strangers around me. But I had no energy to resist, no ideas to corral what was happening to me. I could only rest in it, let myself fall into it and utter a language I could not discern but flowed up through me.

In those moments I heard the words that were being sung and felt only what I could describe as God’s presence from within drawing my body into an assurance of God’s abiding presence with me in this moment. I was at once comforted and scared crapless. God was present and that reassured me, but it also overwhelmed me. This was not a moment of triumph for me, but a moment of fear and comfort that I am still trying to understand how to live in to.

In some ways it seems ridiculous that this was the moment of my disarmament. Surely my life was not bad. I was not starving, I had a job when so many were struggling to find one. But in an odd way this also made the moment only more comforting to me. God did not have a critical stage that I had to fall below before I could be ushered into this presence. For whatever reason this was my moment of weakness, the moment when I had nothing left to intellectualize our life, my calling, my place in the world or my position before God. And in that weakness God met me, God welled up within me and as I was poured out I was filled up.

After worship, through the sermon, throughout the next few weeks and now months since that morning I have tried to understand that moment and how to live into it, how to receive it fully. Do I try to speak in tongues every week, do I remain in the closet every morning trying to reproduce that moment from so many weeks ago? Do I simply resist and let God do the work? I knew this meant something not only for that moment, or my prayer life, but for every aspect of my life.

What I have come to realize is that that wonderful and terrifying moment was as much about revelation as it was about comfort. God’s presence, God’s gift at that moment comforted me, but at that moment it also revealed to me the ways I have tried to mediate my service, my life, and my God. As a theologian I was supposed to be an authority, but I had mistaken this authority for sovereignty. I could not think my way to God and I could not think my way for God.

The desperation of that moment in my life was one I realized I had been resisting throughout my life. The hunger to be at church, to hear, to worship was one I had for so long tried to quench in ways that were barely enough, but in my desperation God had filled me. This gift of a strange tongue was not an accomplishment. It was not a mark of pride or something I can declare as an elevation of my spiritual walk or life.

At the very least, it is a reminder to me that God’s presence abides with those whom God loves in moments of desperation and moments of joy. It is a reminder to me of the many ways I resist this presence on a daily basis. But even more it is something that I hope for from day to day, but also something that I hope seeps into my fathering, husbanding (no its not a word, but it works here!), and my teaching. Each of these aspects of my life is pregnant with the possibility of strange speech that both comforts and prophecies.

The point is not completely the strange speech of that moment, but whether that moment reverberates in such a way as to reveal how my life is uttering a language too plainly, too precisely and in a way that only has to do with me. This was not an entrance into an elite club, but the intensification of my service and my calling to my family, my church, and my students. It was God pressing me into a life with God and a life among God’s people more intensely.

That moment has instructed me to no longer fear those moments of desperation, to fear those strange places, those moments of change however small or large. This strange tongue has revealed to me the little ways I have tried to mediate my own faith rather than receive it. I pray I might live into that holy desperation and be comforted in the midst of the fear, and that this would be a moment that is not confined to a few moments on a Sunday morning, but animates my life with God and with the people whom God loves.

 

It’s a Start…

The New York Times recently reported Attorney General Eric Holder’s move to reinvigorate the the civil rights division of the Justice Department. In this move I think we are beginning to see the originality of Obama’s presidency and his approach to engaging the difficult legacy of race in America. On its own we see Obama attending to the reality of systemic racial inequality and the ways race has shaped full participation in American life. But in relationship to Obama’s attempt to mediate in the Crowley/Gates incident this summer we see a president taking on this issue on both the level of the systemic and the personal. While many conservatives lamented Obama’s insertion into the process, his action was ironically reminiscent of conservative approaches to the race problem: it is about individual moments. In effect, he said, “yes, this is an individual issue, so let’s publicize how this process with individual’s could take place.” But on the other hand he has not left this process to chance. He has not left those impoverished by the legacy of race to the possibility of individual encounters. In Holder’s attention in the Justice Department we see Obama’s approach as not bound to a particular politics, but instead he seems to have been informed by a wide variety of approaches. In some ways it seems as though he is driven not by ideology but by the needs of the nation’s citizens.

 

Willie James Jennings on the Church and Race

My life has been blessed by the guidance and wisdom of a man whom I am also privileged to call a friend. Through him I learned about what it meant to think theologically, to think and teach for the church, and to do theology communally. In many ways he is the bandleader, the drummer who keeps us all in time but never demanded the center of the stage. Because of this too few folks know if his brilliance or his courage, but I hope this will change as he can devote more time to his own research. While not the beginning of his work the interview below represents the trajectory of his work. To be brief. He is the man!

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=858

 

District 9 and the Creation of the Alien

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.

What do you think?

 

Should Teaching Theology Be Like Teaching History?

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 these authors in my descriptions. 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 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 describe other people’s descriptions of God.

In my best moments, I hope my own writing and my 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.