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

That desire to see a changed world must be allowed to find its connection to the desire for one another.

a contrast life aimed at communion.

I did not understand yet that affections cannot be formed on top of affections that have been forced and that the theological academy exists on a mountain of the bones of forced affection.

a teacher sees to the heart of the matter and pulls things through to other things and then more things, connecting what others do not even see as connected—suffering to hope to structures to desire to agents to joy, and all to God in the depths, always in the depths.

Clarity is elusive because we often collapse the overturning into thinking critically or engaging in political, social, ideological, or theological critique of the prevailing orders. We forget that critique itself is being overturned, turned right side up within the new purpose of life together. Critique must aim at communion. The overturning is

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.

Win came to see me with a question. I will never forget his words: “I love my father and my grandfather and the other men in my life. I appreciate what they have given me. But I don’t want to be them. How can I not be them?” I had waited all my teaching career for Win. He had been in my courses and those of my colleagues where a Being beyond the