After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Theological Education between the Times (TEBT))

The urgent work calling us in theological education is to touch the divine reality of longing, to enter into its power and newness as the logic inside the work of gathering

These two ways of educating born of the master’s house have never been mutually exclusive. Both education as master formation and education as emancipatory weapon aim at cultivating mastery—the freedom of mastery (moral formation) or the mastery of freedom (emancipation)—and both silence the sound of a door opening to a life together, toward a form

design: affection. My loves are clear and out in the open. I love books and ideas and talking about them endlessly, deep into the night, or early in the morning with cups of coffee in the bright light of a new day, or, equally pleasurable, in the gray skies of a wintry noon. I love theology, all of it. I love African American studies, all of it. I

They lose attention because many of their teachers have lost attention, shed it in the heat of a formation that narrowed intellectual excellence down to one kind of performance, one kind of white body-mind.

a design that aims to teach her and us what to see and what to ignore, especially in ourselves.

Whiteness invites us to imagine that we become visible to ourselves and others only through its narration of our lives. This was, however, much more than a thought exercise gone terribly wrong. It was inherent to the way Europeans transformed the world into private property and reorganized intellectual life within their cognitive empire.

faculty line up their intellectual loves with their desire to instill their particular vision of orthodoxy or their desire to form students in a theological radicalism that they believe will free us from the problems of orthodoxy.

No holds barred” is an interesting phrase. It describes a match in which wrestlers fight each other using any and every “hold,” even those that could kill, paralyze, or maim their opponent.)

She wanted faculty and students to join her and guide her in reclaiming and retrieving what had been broken into pieces and scattered to the wind—the sounds, sensibilities, wisdom, knowledge, and life strategies of multiple peoples made black by a colonialist brush. But no one understood this as theological work to be done.