Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. For more information, visit faith.yale.edu.
This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Hello friends, thanks for listening. Today, we continue our series honoring the black voices who have shaped and influenced and inspired our experience of the world. It's our way of celebrating Black History Month. And we at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and some of our close friends, are sharing the personal impact that just a few thinkers have had in our lives.
We hope as a result of sharing some of their ideas, a quote or two, that you might also find your way into their words and work. In this episode, Matt Crossman, a New Testament scholar and our director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture honors Willie Jennings.
Particularly, Jennings' work in his recent book After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology in Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School. You can also hear Willie Jennings contributions to this podcast in episodes 7 and 13.
Matt Croasmun: The first time I read Willie Jennings After Whiteness, I was in tears. Honestly, the last time a work of any sort hit me as hard was the first time I listened to Arvo Pärt's Te Deum. It was that sort of experience—visceral, bodily. Jennings writes episodically in poetry and prose, inviting and engaging the whole person. He had me. The tears flowed. It was a release I didn't know that I needed.
As an educator and a lifelong student, I recognized myself in this book, my failures, my wounds into my longings. For years, I've groped for what Jennings lays out so clearly. I would warn my students be aware what's happening to you in the classroom because there's a curriculum that's laid out on the syllabus, the information you'll gain. But then there's a hidden curriculum—the person you'll become.
I would warn them, especially if they wanted to go to graduate school and get PhDs. "Beware the hidden curriculum." But Jennings laid bare for me the substance of that hidden curriculum—white self-sufficient masculinity: a way of being that conflates knowing with owning, that holds up possession, mastery and control (vices all) as its chief virtues.
This is an identity that sometimes I perform all too well in what Jennings calls the role of the "racial paterfamilias," a man who does not distinguish between his person and his property. As a scholar, for whom admitting I do not know feels like saying "I am not." But white self-sufficient masculinity is also something of which in many cases and in many respects, I regularly fall short. And so it haunts me, as it haunts so many academics, as an ideal we can't achieve.
Even more, Jennings helped me see the ways that all that is life-giving in my vocation as a teacher is swimming against this current that I can vaguely feel, but never name. And to which in my continued centering of whiteness, I am stubbornly committed to remain blind.
That's the white self-sufficient masculinity that makes bringing my emotional life into the classroom feel transgressive, like I'm breaking the rules. The white self-sufficient masculinity that makes me speak in hushed tones whenever I dare speak about the ways that I've found life, and admitting to my students that I am in many respects an amateur learning alongside them.
As a former Dean and much-in-demand consultant for academic institutions, Professor Jennings has tremendous insights into the real heart matters of what happens every day in classrooms across the country. But what he says has implications that reach far beyond those theological classrooms and extends to ideals that hold sway in all of our educational institutions, sacred or secular, public or private. And beyond education, Jennings is pointing at deep distortions in the ways that we all think about leadership, the ways that we think about what it means to be mature, what it means to be responsible, what it means to flourish as human beings in our world—all centered around visions of white self-sufficient masculinity, visions that attract us and draw us away from genuine modes of belonging, from lives truly worthy of our humanity. Those ideas have taken up residence, not just in our institutions, but in our hearts. This, I take it, was the cause for a good many of those tears.
But my tears weren't just tears of morning, but rather tears of longing, longing for the beautiful life of mutual belonging that Jennings holds out for us. Longing for the life that white self-sufficient masculinity renders dangerous and undesirable. And as I read, I felt like I was able to begin to see beyond the veil, and I was moved to tears by this invitation to a new way of life of deep connection. Jennings writes, and I'll quote at length:
"The cultivation of belonging should be the goal of all education—not just any kind of belonging, but a profoundly creaturely belonging that performs the returning of the creature to the creator, and a returning to an intimate and erotic energy that drives the life together with God. These words—"intimacy" and "eroticism"—have been so commodified and sexualized that we Christians have turned away from them in fear that they irredeemably signify sexual antinomianism, moral chaos, and sin, or at least the need to police such words and the power they invoke. But intimacy and eroticism speak of our birthright formed in the body of Jesus and the protocols of breaking, sharing, touching, tasting, and seeing the goodness of God. There, at his body, the Spirit joins us in an urgent work, forming a willing spirit in us that is eager to hold and to help, to support and to speak, to touch and to listen, gaining through this work the deepest truths of creaturely belonging: that we are erotic souls. No body that is not a soul, no soul that is not a body, no being without touching, no touching without being. This is not an exclusive Christian truth, but a truth of the creature that Christian life is intended to witness."
I want to bear witness to that sort of belonging.
Evan Rosa: Thanks for listening, friends. Check this episode's show notes for a link to Willie Jennings' book: After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured New Testament scholar, Matt Crossman. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. We produce new episode every Saturday and you can subscribe through any podcast app. Thanks for listening.
