I was inside it.
It happened at the beginning of one semester, well into my years as an academic dean. I was in my office early one morning, praying at my desk, in hope, fear, and excitement at the start of student orientation for the new academic year. Today would be my turn to introduce the curriculum, the faculty, the degree programs, and the strategies for learning here, my turn to speak of the beating heart of theological education. Six thirty a.m.—praying quietly, carefully, and then a knock at my door, not the main door that opens from my assistant’s office but the private door from the hallway that leads directly into my office. I ignored the knock—must be wrong door, I thought—but it came again with authority and consistency. I got to the door quickly, opened it, and there stood a man I had never seen before, but I knew exactly who he was. I had felt his presence before.
He smiled, stepped into my office, walking past me. He sat at my desk. White flowing hair, perfectly manicured full white beard—he wore a gray suit with bright silver buttons, thick silver belt, beautiful ruby blood-red cuff links on his sleeves. He leaned back in my chair. “Tell me about that dream, Willie,” he said, speaking with the full sound of a southern gentleman, each word carrying a plantation cadence.
“As I prayed, I saw the hand of God reaching down from heaven toward the divinity school,” I said. “Go on,” he replied. “Then I saw another hand emerge from this building where we are right now. That hand grabbed the hand of God by the index finger. I then saw that hand bend back God’s finger until it broke. Then I woke up.” The man then started laughing, a knowing laugh. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “This is my school.”
I opened my eyes, startled by a knock at the door. “Your 8:15 a.m. appointment is here. Do I need to make any other copies for today’s presentation for you?” she asked. I said no. Every year at the end of my presentation during orientation week for new students, I would give the same speech, which ended with the following words:
The people who inhabit this educational institution come from all over the world, and they make this place home. Friends, this is now your home. Listen to me! You belong here! This is now your home. If anyone here does anything to make you feel like you do not belong here and that this is not your home, please tell me!
I said this for me just as much as I said it for them, especially after that visit.
I bore witness to it—the energy of a design that conjured a presence.
As an academic dean, I was able to negotiate that design from a different plateau, war against it with different weapons. But before the deanship, it was hand-to-hand combat. Every year I sadly said good-bye to the graduating seniors. I would miss many of them, not primarily because I had grown close to them, but because I had convinced the good ones to respect me, hear my words, trust my judgments, and thereby lessen the burden of my teaching. But each fall, I would have to start over again, convincing—going to intimate war with many new students. The war with them would kick up the war within me, over legitimacy, certainty, and clarity. This second-layer war is part of the hidden tax of teaching while black, as Nancy Lynne Westfield notes in her groundbreaking edited text, Being Black, Teaching Black.1 But it is more than a hidden tax; it is the struggle with the longitudinal effects of colonial design. Modern theological education has always been inside the energy of colonial design. Colonial design is not one thing but many things organized around attention, affection, and resistance, each aiming, each navigating—each a design that designs.2
These are not bad words—“attention,” “affection,” and “resistance.” Indeed, they are energies that should drive educational design. Unfortunately, these energies have been drawn into a distorting creativity that slowly drains us of life by pressing us to perform a particular kind of man. Turning away from that man and toward a creativity that opens toward more life is where the work of design begins. The goal of this chapter is to consider that turning, beginning with attention.
I remember Thelma. She was not at my institution but asked me to help her, mentor her as she began her first year of teaching. I wanted to help her, a white Baptist woman, newly minted PhD in hand, soon to begin teaching theology at a small Baptist college and seminary. Her courses for both undergraduates and seminarians were filled with men. Her school still found women in theological leadership a hermeneutic challenge and an existential crisis. But the school wanted to do better, so they hired Thelma and put her in the classroom to do better for the students.
The students challenged her every breath.
Her first day they questioned every aspect of her syllabus and every point in her opening lecture. She “stiffened her spine” and soldiered through the first day, then promptly went to the bathroom and threw up. She went back to her office, sat in her comfort chair, and called me, crying. I encouraged her, told jokes to lighten the moment, reminded her that she was not alone. There was a senior woman on faculty at her school (the only other woman in the seminary), Metela, who was in Christian formation and who had been at that school for twenty-plus years. I urged Thelma to contact Metela immediately for support and help. Dead silence. Then, “She is not a serious scholar,” Thelma said. I knew Metela and I knew these words—“serious scholar.” Thelma with one sentence had spoken the notorious intellectual hierarchy that imagined disciplines like theology high and lifted up above disciplines like Christian education. Thelma had barely met Metela, but she had learned to see through the eyes of that hierarchy and concluded that the woman was not scholarly enough to help her in this struggle.
A few months later, I heard her give a talk at a professional meeting. Her magnificent armor was now fully in place—her every word exact, her use of theological ideas very responsible, and her comportment extremely guarded, beautifully aligned with someone who constantly taught under fire. She was surviving. Rigorous, serious, scholarly—formed yet forming.
Most conversations about design in theological education imagine design at the point of a syllabus, or interactions with students, or evaluative procedures, all of which are important. But there is another design that superintends those other sites of design. It was this superintending design that introduced Thelma to a horror that she would soon normalize. It was a design that aims to teach her and us what to see and what to ignore, especially in ourselves.
The haunting presence that met me at my desk: this is his design.
He moves in the intimate spaces between dream and hope, dedication and wonder, surprise and curiosity, never appearing as what he is, a usurpation, an arrogance bound up in seeing something at a glance and then too quickly turning away to summarize what was seen. There is a form of evaluation, born of colonialism, born of whiteness, that permeates Western education, distorting both a mind at work and the perception of a mind at work. The European colonial settlers formed horror in this evaluative form. The horror is that they showed us how to look for and at something called intelligence and intellectual ability, and, in the process, they took something from us, the desire to pay attention, constant full attention to one another.
Doctoral Seminar
time for a Hearing, your Honor
Nervous Energy
quivering
until the room
levitates downward with
doctoral students lost in running
a tight circle, underground, faster and faster
I will ask a question—
“Will I sound intelligent, like I
belong to the room, filled with
bitten apples, all staring at me
with bright light?” I sweat
waiting for my slender opening
to give the sound of thought and
prove something to no one
in particular. Until the day
comes when I stop
listening to fears and listen to voices
including my own.
Some never hear the sound of
Intelligence
To become a scholar or a teacher or a student means that you desire to pay attention and to yield your very life to the complete work of paying attention. It is a glorious journey, being guided and hopefully someday guiding others into the art and romance of paying attention to the little and the big, the tiny and the overwhelming of the world. It is the road less traveled, but a road not crooked but straight for all those who will hear not with ears, and see not with eyes, but with desire.
European colonial settlers raped attention, forced it into an embrace it did not want. I don’t use this brutal language lightly, because “rape” is too dense a word and a reality ever to use flippantly. But only such a word captures the horror pressed on intellectual life in the moment of colonialist enclosure where peoples were determined to be stuck or in stages of development, predisposed to excellence or mediocrity and forced to believe that old world Europe and its new world allies held the truth and transcendence of the human and the world itself. But this tragedy meets us in the now, precisely in an assimilation that defines serious, rigorous, scholarly—not with a broad beautiful vision of paying attention, but through a strangled, suffocating vision that defines these ideas by a relentless Eurocentrism.
I finished my years as an academic dean, and after a time of rest and recovery I came back onto the faculty. At the end of the fall semester of my return, the graduate faculty was having its yearly meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the doctoral program, curricular matters, our relation to the broader university graduate school, and recruitment of students and faculty. One colleague raised concern over how students were meeting the language requirements, passing German and French (which under particular circumstances may be replaced with Spanish). He was very worried that with the advent of electronic dictionaries students would be able to “cheat the tests.” His exact words were, “Our students need to know the scholarly languages.” I looked at my close friend on the faculty, another African American man, and we shared a smile and then a quiet laugh at these comments. But then things got serious. Each person who responded to this colleague’s concern used the same phrase, “the scholarly languages.” A dear colleague who taught Buddhist studies leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “What the hell do they mean by the scholarly languages?”
The conversation then turned ridiculous. One colleague suggested that we ban the use of electronic dictionaries; another wanted to limit students to only one dictionary, to be determined beforehand by the faculty; and then finally the faculty person who started this concern threw down the ultimate gauntlet. “I think they should take the test without any dictionary or any translation aid. Either they know the language or they don’t.” Silence. I had come back from sabbatical, but I was tired again.
There was a secret the meaning of which was hidden in this conversation. It was another war that yet rages in sectors of the theological and religious academy. It is a war between theological and religious studies. The war looks different in different places, but where I was dean the war was over theological incursion and conquest. Some religious studies faculty colleagues feared that the divinity school was taking over the shared work and ownership of doctoral education and filling the ranks of doctoral students with Bible-believing, orthodoxy-loving, evangelical-leaning eager young scholars who, because they were all that, were incapable of serious, rigorous, and scholarly work. Such work, they believed, requires an objectivity and therefore an imagined freedom from normative, or confessional, or traditioned thinking. As one religious studies colleague was fond of saying, “If you believe the stuff, you can’t study the stuff.” Of course, for some colleagues this included all religions—all must be purified of believers in the academy.
So the argument over languages concealed a hope that if we make language study as “rigorous” as possible, we can weed out the believers and force the divinity school back into the confessional shadows and out of the pure light of the scientific study of religion. The flaw here (among many) is that divinity faculty were just as committed to the “scholarly languages” as their religious studies colleagues, so this was a contest aimed at absurdity from the beginning. But it was a deadly absurdity.
What broke open the contest and revealed the absurdity that we could all see from the beginning was the comment of one colleague, who gently noted that she had a doctoral student studying early twentieth-century Mormonism and wasn’t sure how the “scholarly languages” would help her work. More silence. But she quickly added that she was all for learning these languages. Then she smiled.
Learning languages can help one learn to pay attention, as Simone Weil so eloquently noted about learning anything from Latin to Greek to geometry.3 But the discussion of language study I witnessed was not about the beauty of attention, but about the colonialist horror of it.
I remember Mr. Yoo. He came to my office near the beginning of the semester. A Korean man in his early forties, Mr. Yoo urgently needed to see me to make a request. He needed, he said, an English tutor to help him with his speaking and especially his writing. He had found out from other international students that I had quietly (out of my budget) paid for a tutor for some the previous semester. I wondered why he needed it. His words and his voice seemed sure-footed in English. Then Mr. Yoo showed me a paper he had written for a class. The paper showed violence, red-pen words bleeding everywhere, comments strong and in many cases inappropriate. There were some grammatical mistakes and messed-up phrases but nothing to deserve these written comments from the teaching assistant for the class. Then I looked at him. Mr. Yoo was crying, apologizing to me for his poor academic performance, reciting to me the precise words the teaching assistant had said to him about his writing: terrible, juvenile, not at the level of graduate work, ill-prepared to be here. I knew Mr. Yoo. He spoke and wrote in Korean, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), French, Italian, and Swahili, having lived in all the places that these languages call home.
I felt the anger, the old anger that had been with me from the beginning …
My first words after his tears and his apologies were “On behalf of this school, its entire faculty, and especially me as the academic dean, I apologize to you and beg for your forgiveness for the way you were treated. No one should ever speak or write to you in this way.”
I knew the professor of this class and the teaching assistant as well (at my former institution we called them preceptors, an ancient designation and beautiful sentiment—one who taught the foundations). The professor lived in the frustrating stage of his career in which he struggled to adapt to change. The students in his classes were not formed like he was, did not have insight into the stories, anecdotes, and sensibilities he shared, and presented something that he did not want—the necessity to work more diligently at communicating and designing his classroom for learning. He focused all his frustration on student writing and demanded that his preceptors bring down the full weight of the law on bad writing. The doctoral student was struggling as well. He had failed one of his preliminary examinations and was feeling the slow but sure abandonment of his doctoral director. He knew it was only a matter of time before he would get the email asking him to stop by his director’s office and he would be told that it might be better if he found someone else to work with. He was in that delicate place that all doctoral students enter when they feel the abyss of nothing all around them, knowing that they cannot go back but unsure about whether they can or even want to push on to finish the program. I knew this doctoral student, encouraged him to continue, and wanted the best for him. But now?
The professor and the doctoral student turned their frustration toward this student and destroyed what should have been a gift—writing, thinking one’s own thoughts with the thoughts of another. This was, however, the design of the man in my chair. Worlds have been won by serious, rigorous, and scholarly thinking, but even more worlds have been lost through the narrowing of what those words mean and look like.
It only takes one encounter with the man in my chair for a student to lose hope, only one time to be told or shown or treated as though they are not smart enough, mature enough, prepared enough to be in the theological academy. Even if such students remain in school, we have lost them. I have shed many tears over that loss, and seen too many students lose attention and turn their educational journey into a prison sentence—doing their time and looking toward its end. When students fall hard into academic despair, it is because they have had their expectation shattered: schools that claim to pay exquisite attention to the world and to God often fail to see them or journey with them in the life art of attending.
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. All of us have been told in the face of this formation to toughen up, to become hard-nosed, to desensitize in an environment grasping for the goal of cold hard truth. But this is one of the main reasons why theological education fails and is failing. It forms an unreal world of petrified attention inside the real world, a real world calling us to attend to the wonders of a God working in the place never released from the rain of divine presence.
Hopeful Eye
Child of a Professor
Eye on you
Focused from birth
Seen precise from the beginning
Never uncorrected, never
quite right.
Legacy of thought, night of
reading, day of talking at every meal, any snack.
The academy is not a home, but your skin.
You became what you are,
a voice in teaching space
so much good possible
if only you had new eyes.
But now your eye is brutal-exacting,
crude knife precision
patiently suffering no slow.
You kill, quietly,
destroy without meaning it.
You passed every eye test, except
the one that matters.
Some of you escaped,
killed the Father-Professor
before he came to see through you
(though he lurks in the shadow waiting to possess you).
Your life wages war, never
on your field but against him.
We need you to win, today
And tomorrow?
We will see
I was talking to a law professor, a well-published, highly respected colleague who explained to me the way he designs his classes and especially the kind of intellectual exchange he wants in the study of law. He believed it would also be applicable for divinity. He knew I had been an academic dean and had been in the academy for over thirty years, but he felt the need to share this with me, and he used the example of a black woman student to do it. “There was this black woman in my seminar. Let’s call her Sylvia,” he said, “and I came at Sylvia just as I did every other student in this class, questioning her presumptions, challenging her ideas, objecting to her conclusions. I was unrelenting. In one very heated exchange with me in the class, she burst into tears. Some people froze, others looked visibly upset” (either because she cried or that he had made her cry, I was not sure from his story). “But Sylvia spoke to me out of her tears in front of the other students and said, thank you for being the first professor here to at least take me seriously.” His chest swelled with pride and satisfaction as he told me this story. His conclusion: “Today, political correctness and identity politics are destroying the possibility of real intellectual formation. Students must be taught to see what is actually important.”
The tragedy here was not found in his style of debate, with its vigorous and heated exchange of ideas, or even his pedagogical commitment to a modified medieval disputatio, which is in fact a beautiful discursive practice, a useful method for organizing ideas, and an able guide into certain kinds of conceptual frames.4 The tragedy is the narrowing of intellectual formation to a form of attention cultivated through brutality, through a design that demands Euro-masculinist gesture as the required carrier of this student’s ideas, her creativity, and her search for understanding.
We should work toward a design that aims at an attention that forms deeper habits of attending to one another and to the world around us. For some what I am pressing toward here makes the simple overly complex and leans toward being obsessively accommodating to students and a wider society already formed in and poised toward more forms of entitlement. Sometimes people have to be forced to reckon with their shortcomings, their failing, and their ignorance and be invited to work harder than ever to achieve excellence of mind and body. I understand the sentiment in this perspective. Paying attention requires everything. For scholars who have given their life to study, we know the respect that is required to inhabit a discipline deeply. We who teach always live close to the temptation to lose patience with those who do not see or sense the urgency of intellectual work or who play in disrespect at the sites of our sacrifice. But our paying attention also requires a commitment to be patient in weaving deep lines of connection between what we teach, whom we teach, and the world we inhabit together with them. It is the promise we make to the world and to God when we say to ourselves that we want to know and we want to understand. Even with such a commitment, our knowing is always as creatures, fragile creatures. We always understand in fragility. Which requires that we hold each other up in our striving to know, to understand, and to pay attention.
I remember Frank. He came to see me one hour before his scheduled class. He had been at the school for decades, taught a legion of students and was deeply beloved, and for good reason. He was an excellent teacher—patient, careful, attentive, gracious, and relentless in making sure students stuck with the work, and it was difficult work. Frank taught languages, Mesopotamian and other ancient languages that only a few people in the world could teach. Over forty years of working in the rare and handling the raw—manuscripts, slices of phrases, and word pieces within pieces within pieces that defied deciphering, unless you were a high priest or priestess of the unseen—helped Frank see meaning in little marks that gestured toward a single letter. Frank amazed me. But now I wondered at Frank in a new way. Why was he here?
After good solid southern pleasantries, we got down to business. Did he need something, a preceptor (teaching assistant) perhaps? “No, my class is small as usual. Five students, brave souls all.” Silence, as I waited to know. Frank put his head down, capturing my carpet with his gaze. “Willie, I can’t remember. I can’t remember anymore.” I knew what this meant. The world he knew so well required a memory. The lifeblood of a scholar is her memory. Through it flows the issues of life. Wild memory is our power. For Frank, his memory contained the hidden treasures of how to decipher the undecipherable, and meanings and phrases and false words and real words, and paths of translation to take and not to take, none of it in books, because it existed in the liminal space between books, and classrooms, and hundreds of hours of poring over fragments. It existed only in his head and was woven deeply into his heart. But now he had limited access to his hidden treasures.
I moved from my seat to the chair next to him. I placed my hand on top of his shoulder, and said, “Don’t worry about it, we got you.” A young black man’s slang words to an older white man that said “we will hold you up.” I told him I would find someone to finish the semester and asked if he had any suggestions for teachers from the many students he had taught over the years. I thanked him for his wonderful work and who he is to the school and to students. Frank exposed a truth that is there at the beginning of the scholarly journey. Attention is always what we cultivate together, and carry with and for each other in hope of its unending.
Designing for attention, however, depends on another 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 love other fields as well, sociology, anthropology, geography, literary studies, and others. I love the ideas of a number of people, and I love them as much as it is possible to love those who are distant to you in time, space, or the contours of life. But I did not always name my loves so openly because in the academy affections are feared because affections have been forced. We live in the wake of a decision to limit loves, directing their flow in only one direction—away from nonwhite flesh and toward the European.
I remember my mistake. It came suddenly and at the worst possible place—in public. It was a hastily called town hall meeting, a divinity school community meeting where we, the chief administrators—the dean, the dean of student life, and me, the academic dean—would listen to the concerns and pain of black students and others who felt the school was not doing enough to address the racially hostile environment of the school. We listened as students told their stories of being disrespected, of not having their voices or ideas or sensibilities honored in the texts they were required to read, in the worship that was planned for the whole community, or in the sensibilities of ministerial formation that remained painfully white and relentlessly Eurocentric. I listened but I didn’t. I knew these stories. I had lived them and was yet living them. I decided to step into this deep water of disrespect and try to pull people out, keep them from drowning, although I myself was not a strong swimmer.
I was tired, very tired. Long staff meetings and long hours listening carefully to those same students, one by one: all of this had weakened the patience that kept my frustration walled off from my words and actions. Tiredness erodes patience like water running continuously against a wall—forming a crease, then a hole, and finally breaking through. I got up to speak and I spoke eagerly about all the wonderful things to love in this school, the things to learn and to do and to experience (as if they did not know this). Then I spoke harshly and against the grain of student feeling, not denying their pain, but demanding they see the good, see what we were doing, what I was doing to change things. I was completely right in what I was saying but completely wrong in saying it. They could not hear me because I could not hear them in the pain of forced affections that performed searing disrespect.
As I spoke, I saw it in their faces—the look of the betrayed, of hope drained by an all-too-familiar reality, the black melancholy of the academy. The more I tried to explain myself, the deeper their faces showed betrayal. I stopped before I finished and returned to my seat defeated, and waited for the judgment. It came swiftly. From that day forward, those students who heard my voice in that meeting trusted it no longer. When they saw me in the hallways, they offered me that plastic greeting reserved for white people they did not trust. Their words to me were always guarded, restrained, separated from their animating passion. Worse yet, I became for them a transparency, someone to look through to see the machinations of white power and the desires of white men to ensure their silence and control. I was no longer a brother in arms but a tool to be used to get what they wanted.
I did want to be used, not as a manipulated or manipulating tool, but as someone who imagined he was facilitating affections—the love of things academic and the joy of conversations. 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.
That forced affection grew out of a white aesthetic regime that circulated and still circulates ideas of the true, the good, the beautiful, the noble, the insightful, the penetrating, the transcendent, and the full range of human existence around the white body. As white colonial settlers built their worlds, they pulled native peoples into their world of aesthetic evaluation, connecting wide varieties of people across vast distances in a shared judgment not endemic to their forms of life. Together they would be taught what a beautiful dress looks like, what magnificent architecture looks like, the difference between good and bad wine, what are a good cigar, a proper pair of shoes, classic clothing, proper speech, correct writing, beautiful comportment, excellent music, proper dance, real art, and much more, and all of this woven into a vision of intellectual formation and moral development that found this white aesthetic essential for that pedagogical work. Indigenous peoples were taught these things in the process of building and sewing and cooking and planting and fixing and maintaining these things. They learned to value what was held up as more valuable than their lives. They were forced to configure the good of life around these goods. What does it mean to have your life always compared to that which has been made (by your actual blood, sweat, and tears) to be greater than your life, for example, this crop, that section of railroad, this ship, this plantation, that government building, this dam, and so on?
It meant an uneasy relationship with the true, the good, and the beautiful, especially when formed in the mind of the master class. (It also meant an uneasy relationship to institutions, which we will explore in the next chapter.) Although native peoples were chained to this white aesthetic, it did not mean that their creativity was chained. They indeed brought their own aesthetic judgments to the built environments and the master-made world pressed upon them, and they made things different and often made things better. The modern world formed in the bricolage of native worlds collided and collaborated with the old world of Europe, and together they formed the cultural baroque, something new and unanticipated.5 Yet this reality of shared agency and shared creativity was occluded by a white aesthetic regime that refused to share the world of meaning and purpose with those outside the old world of Europe or the colonial West as well as their colonialized subjects.
Theological education in the West gloried in this refusal, and took as its task forming people who would embody this white aesthetic regime as fundamental to performing a gospel logic and a Christian identity. Western education is designed within a forced affection, shaped to take all of us on a journey of cultural addition—add to the great European masters other thinkers who are not white or male but who approximate them, add to the great European artists other artists who are also great like they are, add to the eternal wisdom and universal insights of Europe the wisdom of other peoples that resemble them. Add these nonwhite others as embroidery to frame a picture, or spices to season a dish.
Many scholars of color responded and still respond to this forced affection with a commitment to engage in theological conversation and form intellectual and aesthetic visions primarily from the voices, knowledge, and wisdom of their own peoples. The aim is clear: find a way to love. I have, however, met many nonwhite intellectuals in my career within and outside the academy who don’t love their own peoples’ ways of knowing or what they know. Designs of attention and affection have rendered them profoundly skeptical of both expandable founts of knowledge and expandable loves. Yet the terms of struggle here are still caught in a tragic design. The lie that started this flawed design was an exclusion used to organize love. Too many faculty and staff members of theological schools live unaware of that exclusion.
Theological education was created because people made choices to believe this and not that, to seek to understand this and shun thinking about that, to listen and learn from these teachers and to reject those teachers. Education itself does not exist without choices, difficult and sometimes painful choices that demand sacrifice, sometimes rejection, and sometimes persecution and death. Theological education that forgets this will cease to be on solid ground in its work. So an exclusion is necessary, but not the one often presented. The exclusion that began theological education was the choice to find our way to the crowd. We choose to listen to the Jewish rabbi, shunned by many of his own people, feared by the religious leaders, and watched by the Roman authorities. We choose him because we want something from him or we simply want him. This is an exclusion that aims toward a new reality of affection and learning, a learning of God’s ways with other peoples, a learning of God’s love for people we did not believe we could love and be loved by.
How do we design intellectual affection in the troubled spaces of forced affection? How do we escape the exclusionary logic that yet organizes love of learning? Theological education has always been a very difficult site at which to imagine answers to these questions because we have aligned the design of forced affection with the work of teaching toward or against theological orthodoxy. Another quiet war rages in theological schools and between theological schools where 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.
I remember Pam and Robert. They were fourth-year doctoral students in theology, assisting a senior professor in teaching the introduction to Christian theology course. Pam and Robert represented conflicting approaches to their work, and neither was following the approach of the senior professor as faithfully as they should have, which is how and why I got involved. The senior professor gave doctoral students significant freedom in supplementing the required reading with texts that they thought might be helpful to the students in covering the specific topics of the course. This is a great idea if you have schooled your doctoral student assistants in how to perform expanding love.
This was, however, too much freedom for Pam and Robert. Robert wanted to draw the students into a deeper appreciation of the problems of God language and the significance of extracanonical texts and theologically heretical traditions for expanding visions of God. His supplemental readings reflected his dissertation interests. Pam countered with texts that explored biblical theologies and that grounded orthodox theological vision in Scripture, which reflected her dissertation interests.
The students were completely lost, and Pam and Robert had completely lost sight of the students. What was intended as discussion sessions turned into minilectures, where they presented their materials, and if any time was left (which there almost never was), they would comment on the readings the professor had assigned. Worse was the way Pam and Robert treated the students. They rarely asked the students questions or engaged them in what they were thinking. Not once did they explore the contours of faith and the structures of belief already present in the students. Nor did they bring the students into any meaningful engagement with the professor’s lectures or the assigned readings. And when it came time for grading assignments, Pam and Robert evaluated the students on how well they understood their particular ways of approaching theology.
Teaching toward an orthodoxy or toward an antiorthodox orthodoxy is not in fact the problem; it is the exclusionary logic that attends these efforts that turns theological studies into a dismal science, draining it of the surprises of love. Designing for intellectual affection requires a discerning love that knows how to perform an exclusion that does not isolate but opens toward more intense listening and learning from one another, but that kind of design, like a good design for attention, also requires that we reckon with a third complex form of design: resistance.
Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
Of course, you need to know the devil
to resist him.
I remember Cevan. He found his way to see me. He was halfway through his master of divinity program, exactly 1.5 academic years in and 1.5 academic years until the finish line. At the beginning, he complained loudly, “I hate this place. I am not accepted here.” He was Pentecostal—a young black Pentecostal man, shaped in COGIC light and grace (that is, by the Church of God in Christ denomination). He had gone through his first Bible courses, his first taste of higher criticism, the science of the text; gone through his church history, his first taste of the strangeness of his faith; gone through some theology and danced in complex thought; gone through late-night conversations with those he saw as suspect saints. He still did not belong here at divinity school, as far as he was concerned, but belonging was now a wider question, so deep that he was drowning in it.
“I have never preached. Never accepted by my pastor, Elder … (It does not matter).” I understood what he was not saying. It was my story too. I never preached in my home church under the pastor who watched my growing. I was too strange. But this is Cevan’s story. Cevan was too strange. Cevan came to me because it was time to tell me. “I have never kissed a woman, but I have kissed a man.” He said to me what is often said in the middle of the divinity school journey. This truth is often called forth in the presence of those who look for God, to think after God, and follow after divine desire.
“I am thinking about switching from the MDiv to the MTS (master of theological studies).” What he was actually saying was this: “I am very afraid now and I am thinking about switching from the degree program that says I am going to the church and be a pastor to the degree program that says I want to think about God and desire God but I must find a different place where I can belong.” My question in response was simple: Why?
He cried. I cried.
My words after the tears were puny. I said to him, don’t give up on the church, your church, my church, any church. In those years, it pains me to say, I had no deep theological vision to allow him to claim both his love of God and his love of men as shared sites of celebration. (That vision was to come later.) But I did want him to stay in his faith and to take hold of hope. He left my office and stayed in the master of divinity program. But this was not the victory he longed for. And it was not the victory I longed for.
I went to hear his first sermon, his initial embodied yet disembodied proclamation. It was in a church like his own but not his own (the pastor of his home church still barring his entrance to the pulpit). He preached like the preacher, sounded and sung, stepped and shook, sweet sweat and beautiful praise. After the service, I thanked him for the word of God, in him. He spoke to me with full preacherly affect and voice, “Thank you, doc.” Sadly, he continued to wear that affect and that voice long after the first sermon. He found his way of belonging.
He was so much more than the sermon and the preacher suit he wore allowed him to be. But this is the condition of so many who enter theological education. They yield to the resistance and are not guided in the work of cultivating their own.
Speaking, Tongues Out
Have you ever spoken in tongues?
Yielded your voice to the Holy Spirit
It is a matter of the body,
In longing, sheer need
Embodying the Midnight hour
It is so easy to do
But so hard to admit, saying “I need you, I … need
God, I need …”
Then from deep in your belly,
Your royal gut
The secret anguish, the private joy
Fills your mouth
Your thoughts scatter, they shatter
They enfold your words,
like embroidery around a cloth
the cloth is the strange sound-words you
Utter
They utter you, draw you into sound
turn you into a moan, render you a deep groan
You are in total control and controlled totally
This is Praise of the Living God, living in you,
The Spirit dancing in your need for God and more
Utterances …
This is faith easily made fear to a world bent toward control,
fear even of the faithful, fear even to the faithful
Such yielding, desiring bodies are dangerously vulnerable
To that host—preacher-pimps, scholar-pimps, obedience-pimps
To a self, afraid of its own desiring revealed in the speaking tongue,
But the world needs speaking tongues and tongues joined together
Until voices strange and familiar are heard together
Now for the first time and never a last time
I remember Dr. Zachary, almost twenty years into teaching, scholarship, and academic fellowship, and still he worried. He had come out as a young man, before toleration formed or acceptance was a word, or his courage was recognized for what it was—a gift from God. Brilliant from the beginning, an ideal graduate student, a scholar’s scholar, and someone committed to teaching. I met him in my early years of teaching and our friendship grew. He taught at a wonderfully progressive school and was a strong voice on his faculty for LGBTQAI students, but he still worried. He worried about backlash, backtracking, gains lost, and the many places in this world where people like him were not safe, were in danger, and were being killed by a wide assortment of hands. I was invited to his school to lead the faculty in a workshop on teaching, and I did not want to go, because I knew what I would find out about Zachary and his classroom.
Zachary was raised in a lily-white town where black and brown and Asian peoples were coincidentally by practice absent, made so by housing prices, redlining, and other strategies of avoidance, strategies that also marked Zachary’s formal education, both in college and in graduate school. Unfortunately those strategies had formed in Zachary, making him white down to the bone. The progressive school that he served was changing. A demographic wave was hitting the school and shifting the terrain from predominately white students to predominately black and brown and Asian students, precisely the kind of people Zachary had been formed to avoid at all cost, precisely the kind that Zachary had learned about through rumor and stereotype and half-baked books and raw comments by his many intellectual mentors.
Zachary was in a perfect storm. Zachary created a perfect storm. I had met students who had graduated from Zachary’s socially progressive school, each having survived his required courses. They learned a lot but they had to work for it. But this was not the kind of work that anybody should need to do. Now, alone in a room filled with nonwhite students of this school, gay, straight, trans, queer, and more, I heard it in surround sound: Zachary’s classroom was a place filled with very sharp eggshells, and students were afraid to step in any direction. Every lecture, every conversation, every answer to any question carried the feel of an inquisitor, looking for people who would dare to take him back to silence, to hiding, to struggle. Zachary has merged his strategies of resistance to his strategies of avoidance, which turned his classroom into quicksand. He kept his students at his beginning.
Most of them responded in the only way they imagined was available to them: they resisted. They whispered that he was a racist. But in that closed-door meeting with the black man from far away, they said it loudly and clearly. That broke my heart. The students learned to show respect in public but to resist in private, and that resistance carried no pedagogical health, no healing balm. They deserved better, and Zachary was better than what he showed in his classroom. As was our custom, whenever we were together we shared a nightcap, a bit of libation to end a long day and renew friendship. Sitting at a table, he asked me, “So what did the students have to say? We have a lot of conservative students now.” I did not want to test the cords, jump hard on this floor, for fear that something might break. I said, “They are not that conservative. They are struggling to feel heard here.” That was all I said.
This was less the coward in me and more the tiredness. I knew Zachary’s undone work in learning about his whiteness, the thought of which exhausted me, and I knew his raw, tender resistance to homophobia, which frightened me. Maybe I should have spoken to his resistance, trusting that the years of friendship had placed me deep inside his safe space where my words, even strongly offered, would carry a measure of comfort. But I realized that his resistance needed not just a pastoral intervention but also a communal restructuring, neither of which I could offer alone. I finished sipping and aimed myself toward my room.
Theological education is also about resistance. It is the seed from which may grow beautiful habitation or from which may grow mind-bending captivity. Yet how do you design for intellectual resistance? This may be the most pressing question in theological education today, because we theological educators are failing miserably at precisely this—at imagining a form of resistance that builds community.
I will listen, but I am not hear
You will speak, but you are not here-ing
You here me—putting me in my place
But this is not my place, it belongs to
those not wanting escape, me
I am gone, my inside outside already
searching to hear where I am heard
as I listen.
I remember Maximillian and Beatrice. They came to us as already accomplished students, having graduated near the top of their class in their respective schools. Maximillian had graduated from a historically black men’s college in the South (US), and Beatrice from a women’s college in the North (US). They were each poised, beautifully self-possessed, clear, decisive, courageous—and utterly unteachable.
They were not the first students from their respective schools who were this way; indeed, others (although by no means the majority of students) coming from these schools shared this problem. Maximillian and Beatrice, however, were special. Each of them had the power to draw people together, to organize and execute plans. Maximillian quickly became the president of the Black Seminarians’ Union and the graduate student liaison to the black cultural center on campus and the organizer of the Black Graduate Student Alliance. Beatrice just as quickly became the student director of the Women’s Center in the divinity school and a graduate assistant to the director of the university’s women’s studies program. Some faculty members held them up as models because they talked in exactly the ways those faculty members wanted students to talk. Other faculty members gave them lots of space, accepting their papers and listening to their speeches, always recognizing that these were the words and ideas that they inhabited while in college and were simply repeated to us.
Maximillian and Beatrice recognized each other’s talents but also saw each other as opposition. That opposition grew as they engaged each other in classroom skirmishes until their antagonism toward each other grew beyond the bounds of the classroom.
Beatrice struck first. She organized a big conference with powerful speakers, each taking aim at gender oppression in various forms of Christianity and other religions but with a special focus on sexism and homophobia in the black church and an even tighter focus on black male leadership in the black church. Maximillian countered with a huge conference of his own with local and national speakers who brought searing critique against white privilege, and who focused on the intersectional oppression of black women, and with a special focus (as he announced in his opening comments) on “the problem of the white woman for black liberation.” Beatrice surmised that Maximillian was aiming his comments at her, and so she made public comments directly aimed at him. Students lined up behind these leaders, and we had a very serious problem on our hands.
So I invited Maximillian and Beatrice to meet with me and the dean of students to discuss this matter. It did not go well. They ignored us deans and argued intensely, with us watching. They were articulate, insightful, and remarkably tone-deaf to each other. Listening to them, I was reminded of a story that the poet Toi Derricotte told in her book The Black Notebooks, of two students, a white woman and a black man, who got into a very painful and hurtful argument in front of the class. She said,
Once they were standing together, and I felt something so alive between them. I wanted them to go to bed with each other, to make love, for all of us.6
I felt a similar sentiment as I listened to these future leaders. I wanted them to take off their exquisite armor forged in the heat of years of their predecessors’ struggles and touch each other for just a moment and see and feel a new kind of shared strength, and then see the possibilities of a new configuration of armor that they could wear together, forming a different kind of resistance that could build something.
The man who designed this wins too often. He wins because he has formed a design that designs attention, affection, and resistance, all directed toward achieving a compelling outcome, to cultivate the man who serves. The man who serves is too often mistaken for Jesus, but he is not Jesus.
“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45)
A single life has been ransomed for the many. Jesus is the one who offers his body to create a space for communion with God, a joining space. This is God serving. The man who serves, in profound contrast, ransoms the many for the one. This man is a quiet tyrant, who, enamored with his own abilities, imagines the good he can do in the world and then evaluates and organizes people according to their usefulness in fulfilling his dreams. This “man” who serves (who can also be a woman) dreams the dreams of a master.
When the master returns
I will tell him, he did not win
even if I am not sure I believe that.
I will tell him that they are better servants
than their perfectly damaged obedience showed today.
He will probably laugh at me and say
“They are mine.”
I know they are not. Even if they don’t know it,
until he returns to end this master.
The deepest desire that should drive our educational designs is to cultivate people who serve, but that requires us forming them in a vision of people being formed into a people. Such vision articulates servant leadership through the desire to be a place of communion and in so doing to follow our savior in forming Jesus space. This Jesus space draws people to flourishing life together and to a work of building together. But building what? The answer is not what but where—they build around his body, they build against death, and they build toward a place of gathering that will never end.