After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Theological Education between the Times)

Product Description

On forming people who form communion 
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 inaugural volume of the Theological Education between the Times series, 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 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.

Review

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Theologian Jennings (
The Christian Imagination) delivers a searing critique of Western Christian divinity school training and higher education overall. . . . In the tradition of bell hooks and Paulo Freire, Jennings’s insightful indictment of the church and university will be an ideal choice for group discussion.”

“An exquisite expression of faith seeking understanding, 
After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging is a gripping testimony to the life art of attending. When the academy is not a home, but your skin, paying attention requires everything. A fearlessly candid diagnosis of the failures of the theological academy—its soul-killing cultivation of the self-sufficient man builder—Jennings’s poetic truth-telling nevertheless refuses cynicism’s surrender. 
After Whiteness is relentlessly hopeful . . . an incisive indictment against a white aesthetic regime, while yet a joyful proclamation of education’s wonder and holy desire for gathering . . . an intimate confession of fragility and fatigue, while bearing witness to the “rain” of divine presence that bodies may touch and taste. In his plea for religious imagination and the secret agents of ‘fragment work,’ the always-inspired Willie James Jennings accomplishes an overturning that puts life-giving theos back into theological education. Divinity school deans and seminary presidents will declare 
After Whiteness a prerequisite for teaching and learning that aims to be spirit-filled.”

— Andrea C. White
Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York

Praise for the TEBT series:

“At once visionary and realistic, the books in this series offer fresh, short, and very different answers to the question, ‘What is theological education for?’ Studies of that question have appeared every couple of decades and seem to assume that ‘one-size-fits-all’ answers are possible. What’s new and groundbreaking here is that a group of theological educators from a broad array of very different religious traditions address the question in conversation with one another and in light of the changing pla