After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Theological Education between the Times)
Overview
Theological education has always been about formation: first of people, then of communities, then of the world. If we continue to promote whiteness and its related ideas of masculinity and individualism in our educational work, it will remain diseased and thwart our efforts to heal the church and the world. But if theological education aims to form people who can gather others together through border-crossing pluralism and God-drenched communion, we can begin to cultivate the radical belonging that is at the heart of God’s transformative work.
In this book, Willie James Jennings shares the insights gained from his extensive experience in theological education, most notably as the dean of a major university’s divinity school—where he remains one of the only African Americans to have ever served in that role. He reflects on the distortions hidden in plain sight within the world of education but holds onto abundant hope for what theological education can be and how it can position itself at the front of a massive cultural shift away from white, Western, colonial and cultural hegemony. This must happen through the formation of what Jennings calls erotic souls within ourselves—erotic in the sense that denotes the power and energy of authentic connection with God and our fellow human beings.
After Whiteness is for anyone who has ever questioned why theological education still matters. It is a call for Christian intellectuals to exchange isolation for intimacy and embrace their place in the crowd—just like the crowd that followed Jesus and experienced his miracles. It is part memoir, part decolonial analysis, and part poetry—a multimodal discourse that deliberately transgresses boundaries, as Jennings hopes theological education will do, too.
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- Examines the current state of theological education
- Contains part memoir, part decolonial analysis, and part poetry
- Reflects on the distortions hidden in plain sight within the world of education
- Prologue: Secrets
- Fragments
- Designs
- Buildings
- Motions
- Eros
- Epilogue: Beyond the End
Top Highlights
“White self-sufficient masculinity is not first a person or a people; it is a way of organizing life with ideas and forming a persona that distorts identity and strangles the possibilities of dense life together. In this regard, my use of the term ‘whiteness’ does not refer to people of European descent but to a way of being in the world and seeing the world that forms cognitive and affective structures able to seduce people into its habitation and its meaning making.” (Pages 8–9)
“Caught in the powerful currents of a history that moves through us, we inhabit a social world constricted through whiteness that has left us with limited options for imagining how we might be with each other. That social world, to be clear, does not need the presence of peoples of European descent to be active, strong, and destructive. It only needs desire deformed by colonialist urges to control bodies, aimed toward their objectification and exploitation. The distorted erotic power that fuels that world must be freed from its captivity to whiteness and turned back toward its source in divine desire.” (Page 151)
“The subtlety of colonial gathering is very important. It is one thing for people to be gathered in their differences. It is another thing entirely for people to be told how to know, think, and negotiate their differences, and still another thing entirely to have differences created in front of their eyes and told generation after generation to see themselves and others through these manufactured differences.4 People disagree, peoples disagree, but in the long histories of Western colonial education, rarely if ever have people or peoples been allowed to name and voice those disagreements separate from the refereeing positioning of whiteness.” (Page 142)
- Title: After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging
- Author: Willie James Jennings
- Series: Theological Education between the Times
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2020
- Pages: 165
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subject: Theology › Study and teaching
- ISBNs: 9780802878441, 080287844X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781467459761
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-06T20:44:26Z
Willie James Jennings is associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale University Divinity School. His book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race won both the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion and the Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
Reviews
1 rating
Branson Sanders
2/5/2021
"If we continue to promote whiteness and its related ideas of masculinity and individualism in our educational work, it will remain diseased and thwart our efforts to heal the church and the world." It's ok to be white. It's ok to be black. Neither leads to disease. It's good to be masculine (if you're male), and it's also good to be feminine (if you're female). Yet, he desires "border-crossing pluralism..." "...how it can position itself at the front of a massive cultural shift away from white, Western, colonial and cultural hegemony." Again, it's ok to be white. And Western civilization built modernity.