18 minute read
SUMMER 2020 Alum Reflections
Transgressive Conversations
“At the Graduate
Theological Union,
As a teacher, there are moments that compel one to transgress the stability of theory in order to respond to the immediacy of lived reality.
Three months ago, the global community hunkered down before an emerging pandemic. Ethical nuance was reduced to simple precepts: Wash our hands. Stay home. Keep distance. Breathe.
But just as we began to awaken from seclusion, the world imploded as citizens took to the streets to protest the death of George Floyd, yet another Black man whose suffocation exposed the scourge of whiteness that long strangled our democracy.
Two moments— One that threatened the integrity of bodies; Another that pierced through the ideology of our body politic.
In between, I looked on in disbelief, drowning in questions, a growing distrust of the systems that secured my body, identity, and sense of place. For the first time in a long while, I, the teacher, could neither speak nor breathe. Theory could not endure before the transgressions of real life.
As a young teacher, I remember being taken by Benedict of Nursia’s ancient counsel: “Listen with the ear of your heart.” To listen was to encounter, enfleshed in the practice of conversatio morum—convers(at)ions that left one open to the Other’s allure.
Benedict might well have been speaking to teachers. After all, learning is, at heart, conversational. In the encounter of student, teacher, and text, there prevails a constant interrogation of ideas, knowledge, and comprehension— exposing one to the arbitrariness of body, identity, and sense of place.
To the extent that learning nudges one to cross into the unknown, it cannot but transgress.
At the Graduate Theological Union, I learned to entwine body, identity, and place with the rigors of theological work. Conversations shaped ideas and expositions, texts and corporealities. And so,
with Naomi Seidman, I intuited layers of history embedded in words; with Mayra Rivera, I gleaned the other-ness of texts and potency of imagination; with Boyung Lee, I elevated context on equal footing with theory; and with Michael James, I resurrected the primal impulse of a story—my own—to break through colonial discourse.
These teachers enfleshed scholarly conversations in a manner that allowed transgressions between theory and lived reality, refusing to privilege one at the cost of diminishing the other.
At a time when a single breath can affirm bodily integrity while eroding our national ideology, how might we teach? How might we endure the suffocation of familiar tropes and cross over—indeed, transgress—into the possible? How might we heal?
When scholars, ministers, theologians, and teachers are compelled to speak, might we, instead, converse? In choosing to listen, might we submit “to what is ‘intractable’ . . . [to encounters] where the political weapons of consciousness [become] available in a constant tumult of possibility.”[1]
Perhaps in beholding the Other beyond ourselves, we might simply love; moved to an enduring conversion.
[1] Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Theory Out of Bounds, V. 18, p. 142. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Dr. Michael Sepidoza Campos is an Associate Professor in the Theology and Religious Education Department of De La Salle University, Manila. He also teaches religion at Convent & Stuart Hall, Schools of the Sacred Heart, San Francisco. Campos obtained his PhD from the GTU in 2011.
Why Black Lives Matter
“Black lives matter also to God.”
Black lives really do matter. While they have never publicly mattered to this country, they have always mattered to Black people. Recent protests in the aftermath of the public execution of George Floyd have brought both positive and negative results. On the one hand, Floyd’s legal lynching has elicited a Macedonian call answered by outraged Blacks and sympathetic whites to end racial profiling and police brutality now! But on the other hand, the racial mood of the country still lends the impression that this was an isolated incident and that systemic racism does not extend to other major facets of national life. This thinking, however, does more to assuage white guilt than free Black people.
The Black community understands that these recent protests are but the latest round of a history of prophetic responses to white hegemony — the latest outcry of justified rage from the trenches of Black oppression. For in that physical and psychical trauma has been borne by the Black liberation tradition most notably recognized in Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells Barnett, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer — a tradition that has incessantly made the public statement, Black lives matter! They matter as an infusion of hope to a Black community that needs a sense of somebody-ness, and they matter as a formidable challenge to a white community that has long rendered Black humanity an aberration.
The veracity of the position lies in the contention that God created all human beings, including Black human beings, in freedom. Thus, to deprive a group of human beings’ freedom in any way is antithetical to divine will and has no place in a responsible Christian theology. That to theologically sanction the desecration of Black humanity while confessing love for the God of Jesus Christ is the pinnacle of sin. In such a milieu, God is an idol, not a liberator!
This is why for all religious institutions the salvation of the world lies in their response to the challenge put forth by a liberating hermeneutic regarding true reformation: seeing God in people of color! If America’s gruesome racial history has not done anything else it has taught us that true reformation has less to do with altering a particular doctrine or liturgy, not in the true apostolic authority (Catholic) or in the elimination of indulgences (Protestant), but more to do with the radical altering of religious meaning itself. This means a new focus, not on ecclesiastical dogma, but on repairing the tattered and torn Imago Dei in people of color in a world continually committed to their debasement. Only through an abandonment of the seminal value of racism will the church and all other religious institutions be a part of a liberation reformation. Only in the prophetic transformation of human value will Black lives matter in a way that reflects the true nature of divine will.
Dr. Harry Singleton III is a professor at Benedict College and the University of South Carolina. He graduated with his PhD from the GTU in 1998.
A Pilgrim’s Perspective on a Spiritual Reboot
Since the beginning of this year, the failure of systems that were meant to protect and preserve has exposed the fragility of international relationships, precarity of physical health, vulnerability of mental wellbeing, and malignant flaring of deep rooted discrimination based on race and immigration status. In the wake of such global anxiety, communities have united to curate reparative modalities for reform and renewal, often finding inspiration in each other’s rituals and spiritual practices. For Muslims, the Hajj pilgrimage is an archetypical exercise in reflection on the human condition and working toward a spiritual reboot.
The Kaaba is a sacred historical symbol revered by Muslims as the House of God and the direction (qibla) towards which they orient themselves to perform their daily ritual prayers (salat). Although the Qur’an deems it an obligation on all humanity (Q3:97), Muslims observe the annual Hajj as a key tenet of faith and practice. Enshrined within the Kaaba are the narratives of male prophets as well as the grave of a woman named Hajar whose actions are embodied within Hajj rituals. As the Hajj season begins, though a physical pilgrimage might not be possible this year, reflecting on its spiritual aspects will help ease the anxiety, grief, and insecurity caused
by the precariousness of our time.
While COVID-19 has altered our sense of normalcy, the reemergence of the pandemic of discrimination has questioned our communal ethics. Racial and ethnic minorities in the West and religious minorities in the East are being blamed for the spread of the coronavirus, Black lives continue to be blatantly disregarded, and international students brace themselves for the nervewracking wave of stipulations by ICE. This has been a shocking reminder that the killer virus of prejudice has been stealthily lurking under the pretentious garb of democracy and human rights.
In bravely seeking hope and innovative strategies to navigate through the despair and distrust, most of us have resorted to our religious traditions and spiritual practices. Hajj rituals offer an opportunity for critical introspection of individual and collective human conduct. Pilgrims reflect on the true meaning of home and security as they leave behind the comforts of their physical homes to seek the spiritual homecoming at the House of God. Donning their pilgrimage robes, they mindfully strip off all assumed, construed, and imagined identities to embrace their core human identity. Circumambulating in an anti-clockwise movement, they consciously undo the grip of delusional supremacies around color, gender, and class. Standing at the station of Abraham as a multicultural, multiethnic, and multinational group they seek the human in themselves and the other. Embodying Hajar’s sprint between the hills of Safa and Marwa, they are reminded that inaction in the face of injustice is not an option. Hajj rituals are a way of detecting and removing malwares in the human system and the Eid of Hajj symbolizes an intentional resolution to sustain spiritual and social wellbeing.
While our resilience, interdependence, interconnectedness, and our faith in God during these anxious times of killer viruses and systems failures has undoubtedly provided us with comfort and hope, it is important to ensure that these measures are not reduced to mere crisis management, but rather translate into a sophisticated and strategic rebooting of the human system. Let us awaken the pilgrim in us and embark on a journey inward and toward the substance of being human.
Dr. Mahjabeen Dhala is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Madrasa-Midrasha Program at the GTU. She graduated from the GTU with her PhD in 2021 and her MA in 2017.
Practicing What We Preach
As a homiletician and lifelong churchgoer, I have often heard people use the phrase “practice what you preach.” When people use this phrase, they are reminding others to actually personify or live out what they are advising others to do.
This exercise should not be confined to individuals, but should be expanded to include all communities and institutions, including seminaries and divinity schools. We equip people of many different faith traditions to do work they feel God is calling them to do in the world. We teach them to critically interpret and critique sacred texts and the world in which they live to discern their divine callings. We must practice what we preach.
Over the course of the past few months, the painful and ubiquitous racially motivated injustices perpetuated in our culture have been thrust into the spotlight. Racism is one of the original and perpetually pervasive sins of the United States of America. As the result of the historical currents of white supremacy and white racism continue to permeate the cultural waters in which we all swim, we are conditioned to adopt these racist norms and values in order to survive and/or thrive in this cultural context. Understanding this, practicing what we preach mandates that we not only teach our students to understand, critique, confront, and, dismantle the many structures that uphold white supremacy, but that we must also do our own internal work to understand, critique, confront, and dismantle white racism within our own institutions.
Louisville Seminary has begun to practice what we preach. Yet, we still have a long way to go. For almost twenty years, we have worked to teach our students about racism. We have educated our faculty and students about the culture of racism. We have examined our curriculum and decentered white male scholarship within various theological disciplines. We have restructured our faculty work into frameworks that decenter the Enlightenment notions that scientific ideas, Eurocentric worldviews, and ways of being are the models upon which theological education should be based. We have committed to ensuring that our faculty is continually representative of the larger society (eight out of seventeen full-time faculty members are people of color). We have committed to ensuring that our senior leadership is representative of larger society (four out of six members of the senior leadership team are people of color). We have begun to regularly recruit students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, faith traditions, and associations. We continue to work to ensure that our Board of Trustees is representative of our wider society. All of this work is admirable. However, in all of our doing, we have never taken a deep dive into our own institutional culture to intentionally and systematically dismantle the systems and structures that continue to perpetuate white supremacy.
Now is the time to do this very difficult work. Beginning this fall, we as a faith community will examine policies, practices, traditions, and commitments (financial and otherwise) within every sector of our community for ways we all continue to uphold white, racist culture. This will be difficult and painful work. No one individual, department, or discipline within our community will be able to escape responsibility and culpability because we have all been socialized within this destructive, deceptive, and damning culture. Undergirding this praxis is the belief that our students will learn more from what we do than what we say.
How long this part of the journey will take, we do not know. What we will discover about ourselves, we are presently unsure. What we do know is that we need your prayers. Pray for us that we may adhere to the advice the Apostle Paul gave to the church at Galatia (Galatians 6) to not grow weary in our welldoing before we reap the harvest God has in store for us.
Dr. Debra J. Mumford is Dean of the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. She graduated with her PhD from the GTU in 2007 and was named the 2019 GTU Alum of the Year.
The 6 Things Vulnerable Immigrants Need You to Hear
It’s an afternoon last week and we’re talking through video cameras; or it’s an afternoon the semester before and a student is sitting in my office, tearfully releasing years of pent-up emotion; or it’s an afternoon in the last decade and we’re walking together, trying to fit this conversation between classes. Each of these experiences is a privileged moment that happens only as we build trust. In each instance I can truthfully say “I remember … I know … I felt.” These are important words of companionship and purposeful vulnerability, and they make evident how vital it is for students of color to know faculty who not only look like them, but more significantly have encountered the world in a way that shares and values their own experiences.
In these last three years, these conversations about the wounds that vulnerable immigrants and their children carry have become more painfully urgent. I have been called to heartbreaking prayer groups with custodians, to many hours spent making sense of bureaucratic messes, to the homes of the sick, to tearful funerals, to raising money for the furloughed and unemployed, to reading legal briefs, to countless demonstrations, and to simply embracing a fellow human trying to survive. Trumpism has been particularly hard on immigrant families and people of color, and its rise requires us to begin peeling back some of the taboo subjects we didn’t acknowledge or discuss even among ourselves.
As a public theologian-teacher-activist, I want to give you a glimpse into these conversations because they reveal some of the burdens we need everyone’s help to carry.
1. We are defined by others.
As a child, I remember the taunts. I was an “alien,” an outsider. I was named by others, not for the dynamic and fragile self I was growing into but through hurtful labels that made it easy for me to be dismissed. Today, some of my students are called “illegals,” elders recall being called “spics” and “beaners,” and Latinx people, lumped together under loathsome xenophobic labels, have been made into the fuel for Trumpism’s fire: not fellow humans, not neighbors, not made in the image of God.
2. We carry internalized racism.
Without sympathetic mirrors in which to see ourselves, we believe these denigrating labels and sink into our own perceived unworthiness. We even classify ourselves by levels of whiteness, knowing that those of us who can pass as white will have a much easier time than those of us who can’t. Some of us align ourselves with the powerful, hoping for acceptance. We live between the exhaustion of marginality or the self-hatred of complicity, and we often see no way out.
3. We feel like impostors.
When we are accepted into a university, a graduate program, or a coveted job, we often feel that, “it’s just too good to be true.” My students, whose parents are farm or factory workers, tell me about the phone call from our university announcing their awarding of the coveted Social Justice Scholarship. The memories are of tears and then cautious stoic disbelief— always afraid someone has made a mistake. Sometimes it takes these young people years to believe that we belong to each other and that their flourishing is truly our most central concern.
4. We battle survivor syndrome.
As the first in my family to go to college, I cried my first few nights in my new university dorm room, asking myself, View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/cecilia-gonzalez-andrieu
“Why am I here?” I had shared a room with my Abuela my whole life. I was accustomed to trying to figure out how to pay rent, or talk to the landlord about our substandard living conditions. Now here I was in a beautiful room, outside my window were fragrant trees and an ocean breeze. My heart ached and I reproached myself for this privilege, knowing that outside my Abuela’s window was a car body shop full of noise and toxicity. How could I spend my time with books and college life, while my family was home struggling to survive? So many of my students live in this constant paradox and it becomes paralyzing, keeping us from joy and from claiming our rightful place.
5. We face a relentless but also revelatory “cotidiano.”
The vulnerable cannot choose their daily experiences: lo cotidiano. Situations come at us and must be faced. I listen to my friend who works at a food packing plant and spends a month gravely ill with coronavirus. He is now waiting for a clean bill of health to return to that same plant so he can feed his family. He has no other choice and his voice reveals a wounded grace. He cries as he talks about his faith and reaching out for God’s embrace. His suffering, echoing the wisdom of many religious traditions, continually reveals to him his need of God. His religious beliefs mature, not built on abstract propositions but on the real, abiding presence of God in the midst of every day. Those conversations in my office, in the quad or on a call, almost invariably end here: “How are you taking care of yourself?” I ask. Everything about the life of my “undocu” student or my friend on the custodial staff has always centered on taking care of others. For them, our Ignatian motto of, “being women and men for others,” forms the core of their identity, not as a nice slogan but as an exhausting reality. Part of my work is to help us see that we carry this sense of duty deep within us as a script, which tells us we have no worth, but that perhaps by helping others we can at least be useful, útiles.
We talk about small children, the elderly, and the sick, and ask, “aren’t they God’s beloved?”
A light appears in their eyes and they say, “yes, they are!” I press on, “are they being useful to anyone?” The light burns brighter, “no.” We talk, about how each person that calls us to a deeper love brings us to a truer sense of ourselves. How my Abuela, even when she was elderly and blind, filled my life with joy. I so loved who she was, and this sense of her inherent worth made my heart grow! “But she needed me to care of myself,” I tell my students, “so I could finish school, so I could do what she worked for and dreamed for me.”
“We need to make sure we have our oxygen mask on,” I tell them, recalling airplane safety videos, “so we can then help others.” We look into each other’s eyes. “Yes, we need our oxygen.” Someone has understood our weariness and honored it.
Communities of color need those who would be our allies to know how these often-unnamed realities weigh on us. We need accompaniment, space, and encouragement. We need to be made present, to be seen, and to be heard. And if we look tired, it’s because we are. We need a breather, the fresh oxygen of accompaniment, and then to have a mirror held up to us that says, “you are unconditionally loved.” That’s the God I believe in, the One who is madly in love with us, not in spite of, but because of our beautiful fragility.
Special thanks to my graduate students Manuel Valencia, Hilda Tapia, and Leonardo Mendoza, who shared their experiences with me and read a first draft of this essay. We do this work together, en conjunto. Dr. Cecilia González-Andrieu is a professor at Loyola Marymount University. She graduated with her PhD 2007 and was named the 2020 GTU Alum of the Year.
