Preaching Racial Justice - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 162698543X ISBN 13: 9781626985438

Verlag: Orbis Books (USA), 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Preaching Racial Justice conveys the urgency of Christian antiracism preaching from ecumenical, intercultural, and intergenerational perspectives. In addition to being a handbook for preachers, Preaching Racial Justice can readily serve as a textbook for ecumenical schools of theology and ministry, as well as for discussion groups among congregations looking for insightful theological and practical ways of understanding race, racial justice, white supremacy, white privilege, white fragility, racial oppression, black suffering, #blacklivesmatter, racial and personal reconciliation and healing, or beginning the necessary process of dismantling racism within the church and society.

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Rev. Gregory Heille, OP, serves as professor of preaching and evangelization and directs the Doctor of Ministry in Preaching program at Aquinas Institute of Theology. With Deborah Wilhelm, he codirects Aquinas Institute’s Lilly-funded Delaplane Preaching Initiative.

Rev. Maurice Nutt, CSsR, is a Redemptorist missionary preacher living in New Orleans and an Aquinas Institute Doctor of Ministry in Preaching graduate. He is the author of Down Deep in My Soul: An African American Catholic Theology of Preaching and teaches in Aquinas Institute’s Lilly-funded New Frontiers in Preaching Academy.

Dr. Deborah Wilhelm codirects the Aquinas Delaplane Preaching Initiative. She is an adjunct professor of preaching and evangelization at Aquinas Institute and a lecturer at Loyola University of New Orleans. She holds the Doctor of Ministry in Preaching from Aquinas Institute and resides in Oregon.

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RELIGION / Christian Ministry / Preaching

RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations

PREACHING RACIAL JUSTICE

Gregory Heille, Maurice J. Nutt, and Deborah L. Wilhelm, editors

ISBN: 978-1-62698-543-8

ORBIS LOGO

Cover design: Michael Calvente

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Preface

Gregory Heille

“Maybe it really is like it says in the Bible,” I offered. “God is a shepherd and we’re his flock and he watches over us.” . . . Finally Albert whispered, “Listen, Odie, what does a shepherd eat?” I didn’t know where he was going with that, so I didn’t reply. “His flock,” Albert told me. “One by one.”1

In the novel This Tender Land, as quoted above, two teenagers in a non-Catholic residential Indian school in 1930s southwest Minnesota talk about God. Their view of God aligns with the same sort of personal and culturally wounded experiences that, for many, still put the credibility of the church (and God) in an untenable position today. In the institutional Petri dish of this fictional residential school, racial prejudice and sexual abuse are all mixed together— and in the eyes of many, nothing much has changed to this day.

The authors of this book are preachers, teachers, catechists, and pastoral ministers who have worked to make a Catholic response to racism that is intelligent, pastoral, and prophetic. Though we can hardly be surprised to hear when our colleagues in church ministry find themselves in a reluctant, anxiety-producing, or seemingly untenable position regarding preaching or teaching about Christian responses to racism, we say: Do not give up! Our vocation to God’s mission challenges us as disciples and ministers of the Good News of Jesus to learn how to hold in creative tension the competing values at play in society, our lives, and the church— for the sake of the gospel. Together we can make a difference.

Our listeners have different expectations about our teaching or preaching or even talking together about such hot-button social issues as racial justice. While many preachers and teachers want to address complex social problems, they understandably are concerned about appearing too political or polarizing or losing listeners.2 Young adult and adult formation about the church’s social teaching is thin, and many listeners are adamantly opposed to hearing social issues mentioned from the pulpit. Other listeners, especially the historically and culturally oppressed among us, consider it our Christian responsibility to confront these social issues.

Like our listeners, we preachers and teachers also diverge, differ, and argue about the politics of today’s racism, why the church would involve itself, and whether we can meaningfully respond. We might do well to listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s teacher at Boston University, Howard Thurman, who, in his iconic Jesus and the Disinherited, writes: “Many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.”3

After the 2014 death of Michael Brown, the Ferguson Commission in St. Louis called upon civic and church leaders to serve as catalysts for the uncomfortable conversations, alignment, and empathy needed to effect positive change. The report, “Forward through Ferguson: A Path toward Racial Equality,” also calls for applying a racial equity lens, asking who is disproportionally impacted or left out. These questions and these conversations are acts of leadership. They can and should happen in the church— in local congregations and neighborhoods and on a diocesan and national scale.

In this book, we authors believe this dialogue can be a source of tremendous creativity for mission in the church. This challenging work of gospel reconciliation can measure how we participate in God’s mission, a reign-of-God mission that, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., has to do with person-to-person transformation into beloved community. We preachers and our communities can become “a living sermon.”

Can we, the church, say presente and find a way forward?

The Church’s (and God’s) Credibility Is at Stake

How can we pastoral ministers, church theologians, and the entire baptized community courageously talk about the anti-gospel values that feed the institutional racism, sexism, and elitism that so pervasively infect our popular culture, our churches, and our homeland? Can we effectively represent an experience of God and religious institutions in which, to use Pope Francis’s image, the church is a field hospital? As the authors of this book think and talk about Christian responses to racism, we aspire to truth and reconciliation. We believe that God has sent a good shepherd. In Jesus’s name, our goal is to help heal the trauma by charting some paths toward preaching and teaching in the beloved community

To achieve the goals of truth and reconciliation, we believe it will help if church ministers and academic theologians consult together to bring the tentative insights of dialogue to the problem of the church’s response to racism. One voice from the theological side of this conversation is Katie M. Grimes from Villanova University. In “Breaking the Body of Christ: The Sacraments of Initiation in a Habitat of White Supremacy,”4 Grimes makes a disturbing assertion about the abuse of baptism in the practice of slavery: “Baptism served slavery in the following ways: it severed the kinship ties of the women and men it helped to enslave, it rebranded their bodies with marks of white ownership, it coerced slaves into Christian community, it served to infantilize enslaved adult women and men, it aggrandized white women and men as masters of both heaven and earth, and it helped to make and maintain race.”5 Katie Grimes writes that “black slaves were incorporated into Christ’s body not so much by eating the body of Christ, but by being eaten by it.”6

In this view, if white-bodied church folk unknowingly or unintentionally engage in segregationist practices that effectively bless white bodies over and against all others, then the church’s sacramental signs are corrupted. In all probability, the gospel is no longer preached or heard. Grimes argues that the church cannot save itself if it takes white flight from the otherness in its midst. Grimes correctly argues that there can be no social redemption for a segregationist church with white supremacist ritual practices without a more porous understanding of the wall of apartness separating the church from the larger culture. The church is part and parcel of the larger culture and remains deeply influenced by America’s original sin of racism.

Theologian M. Shawn Copeland from Boston College also has looked at racism through the lens of baptism, though she has done so differently. In a lecture on “Memory, Emancipation, and Hope: Political Theology in the Land of the Free,” twenty years before Katie Grimes’s article, Copeland responds to the original sin of five hundred years of slavery, racism, and white-body supremacy in the Americas with a theologically direct invocation of the core message of the Christian gospel (the kerygma):

What sort of Church are we? What sort of Church must we become? We cannot live authentically—that is, attentively, intelligently, reasonably, responsibly—under the aegis of the reign of God and sleep through the distortion and deformation of the whole people of God. In rethinking ways of being Christian or ways of being Church, we must begin by taking up a place before the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. It is here that we grasp the enormity of the human suffering and oppression of the Indians, Africans, and mestizos. It is here that we grasp the meaning of a triumphal...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Orbis Books (USA)
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 162698543X
• ISBN 13: 9781626985438
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Herausgeber: Heille Gregory, Nutt Maurice, Wilhelm Deborah
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Logos Europe; contact@logoseurope.eu; ; Rue Nicolas Possin 9; La Rochelle; 17000; Frankreich