Prologue
1. My argument in this book draws inspiration and insight from the groundbreaking text God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education (New York: Pilgrim, 1985), written by the famous Mud Flower Collective, who were Katie Geneva Cannon, Beverly W. Harrison, Carter Heyward, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Bess B. Johnson, Mary D. Pellauer, and Nancy D. Richardson. This text marked an important moment in self-reflection for Western theological education. While it was criticized after its publication, it has never received the appropriate attention for the way it framed the problem of theological education. See Stina Busman Jost, Walking with the Mud Flower Collective: God’s Fierce Whimsy and Dialogic Theological Method (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). Similar insight comes from the important work by Rebecca S. Chopp, Saving Work: Feminist Practices of Theological Education (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995).
2. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990); Andrew Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002).
3. Willie James Jennings, “Can White People Be Saved? Reflections on the Relationship of Missions and Whiteness,” in Can “White” People Be Saved? Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), 27–42.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Read especially chaps. 4–6.
5. Unless otherwise indicated, biblical quotations in this book come from the New Revised Standard Version.
1. Poem adapted from the hymn I Love to Tell the Story, by Catherine Hankey.
2. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume Books, 1993).
3. Susan Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
4. Edward Schillebeeckx, “Secular Criticism of Christian Obedience and the Christian Reaction to That Criticism,” in Christian Obedience, ed. Christian Duquoc and Casiano Floristán (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1980).
5. I am following the use of masculine language faithfully here because it is precisely in the imagined form of a man that this virtue is realized.
6. The common motto that white men cited in educating Native American children was “Kill the Indian, save the man.” The history of American Indian residential schools always revealed the organizing principle: to form self-sufficient white men of their men, of their women, of their children—or kill them. Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2004); K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).
7. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989); C. Kavin Rowe, One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
8. See Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
1. Nancy Lynne Westfield, ed., Being Black, Teaching Black: Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies (Nashville: Abingdon, 2008).
2. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 4.
3. Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 57.
4. Olga Weigers, In Search of the Truth: A History of Disputation Techniques from Antiquity to Early Modern Times (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014); Olga Weigers, A Scholar’s Paradise: Teaching and Debating in Medieval Paris (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015); Ulrich G. Leinsle, Introduction to Scholastic Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
5. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2002); Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds., Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
6. Toi Derricotte, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey (New York: Norton, 1997), 128.
Chapter 3
1. Family Worship in a Plantation in S.C., appearing in “The War in America: The Federals shelling the City of Charleston—shell bursting in the streets. From a sketch by our special artist,” Illustrated London News, December 5, 1863, Sacred Arts Collection, Special Collections, Buswell Library, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
2. Robert Knapp, “Coping in Bondage: Slaves,” in Invisible Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 125–69; Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, and Culture, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 131–84; Emanuel Mayer, The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire: 100 BCE–250 CE (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
3. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 44–124.
4. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
5. Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 48–49.
6. Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2016).
7. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
8. Interestingly, Rebecca S. Chopp, in her important book Saving Work: Feminist Practices in Theological Education (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), makes a similar observation, drawing on the insight of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza where Schüssler Fiorenza states “that women not only have to move from lay to professional persona but [also] to a masculine, assertive, central speaking public one.” Chopp goes on to note the direction of Schüssler Fiorenza’s point here: “Women are supposed to master the discourses and disciplines of theological education and assume the subject position of an elite white Eurocentric male. Schüssler Fiorenza observes that women actually have three possibilities. The first possibility is that women can assume the masculine position and learn to do it like a man. The second possibility is that women can totally reject this subject position and try to find preferred ‘feminine’ ways…. A third possibility is for women to become bilingual and learn the male system in order to transform it.” She “calls women who follow the third option [of] resident aliens … both insider and outsider … insider by virtue of residence or patriarchal affiliation to a male citizen or institution; outsider in terms of language, experience, culture and history” (115). I am indebted to Ted Smith for reminding me of this piece of Chopp’s text.
9. Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Chapter 4
1. Willie James Jennings, “Race and the Educated Imagination: Outlining a Pedagogy of Belonging,” Religious Education 112, no. 1 (2017): 58–65.
2. David Rex Galindo, To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017); Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–58; Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
3. Jennings, “Race and the Educated Imagination,” 60.
4. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016).
5. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1997).
6. Of course, there are always exceptions to this vision of education, and one of the most important was Howard Thurman, whose vision of the beloved community remains underappreciated and undertheorized or theologized. See his With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1979); Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 2000); Howard Thurman, The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1972).
7. Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Jonathan D. Jansen, Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Bradley A. Levinson, Douglas E. Foley, and Dorothy C. Holland, eds., The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
8. Lisa H. Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
Chapter 5
1. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Serge Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014); Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
2. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
3. Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: The Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); Marilyn Lank and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Aileen Moreton Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
4. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Pekka Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Wade Churchill, Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002); David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
5. Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade: 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 171–80.
6. Randy J. Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004).
7. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Lisbeth Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
8. Starting with the magisterial work of Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984), 53–59; Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008); Wendy Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), also her Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
9. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 55.
10. Brock, Journeys by Heart, 26.
11. Willie James Jennings, Acts (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017), 53–61.
12. Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire, 99.