KTF Weekly Newsletter: The Dark End of the Street, St. Francis, I Miss it All
July 29, 2021
Hi everybody,
Thank you so much to everyone for your continued support. We really appreciate all the people who just signed up after coming off the initial free trials we gave out. We couldn’t do what we’re doing without you. So, onward to this week’s resources:
Suzie’s recommendations:
Christians who seek to overcome the lies of Islamophobia require new hermeneutical lenses through which to understand and interpret scripture. InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars blog recently published a two-part post by Bill Nelson that provides thought-provoking insights into how we might re-frame our understanding of Ishmael in a way that challenges the typical “clash of civilizations” narrative. The historical figure of Abraham’s first-born son is a central character mentioned in both the Bible and the Qur’an. While Ishmael is generally viewed within both traditions as the patriarch of the Arab people, in recent decades, Christian commentators have had a strong tendency to cast him in a purely negative light as a sort of foreshadowing of inevitable enmity between Muslims and Christians. Nelson challenges this pervasive narrative through an exegetical approach that is well-grounded biblically, culturally, and historically. Moreover, it is not difficult to see the rich implications of such a paradigm shift for Muslim-Christian relations on both an interpersonal and geopolitical level. You can access parts one and two here and here.
The Lit Review podcast is a fantastic resource started with the goal of better connecting grassroots organizers to the academic work fueling the movements in which they take part. Each episode features an organizer talking through a book that has shaped their approach and informed their theory of change. While the pod is now in its third season, episode 12 of season one is a particularly powerful and important examination of the sexual violence perpetrated against women of color that, in many ways, sparked the civil rights movement. It also highlights the critical role that Black women played in bringing these atrocities to light and challenging the systems of racism and oppression that allowed them to take place. All of this is excavated through an overview of Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street. Serious content warning here for language and descriptions of sexual violence.
Jonathan’s recommendations:
The steps to decolonize our faith are usually intimate and affect those who experience life with us in profound ways. Our parents, children, friends, and spiritual communities can feel confused, challenged, and uncertain as we wrestle. Navigating conflict by radically interrogating the cultural norms and family narratives that drive our actions is necessary to be formed for redemptive work and our daily flourishing. This is especially true in an age of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda. This article from Vice by David Gilbert is striking in its brutal description of the broken relationship between a Parkland, Florida school shooting survivor and their father who got caught in the QAnon tornado and now believes his own child’s continued mental suffering is based on a hoax. The seeds of disinformation are starting to grow and flourish, and they are also merging with the power structures of American society. Media Matters reports that 40 Republican candidates are QAnon followers. Believers in Christ are called to shed light in the darkness and not to exchange truth for a lie. We must love the people around us spreading misinformation out of the lies they believe about climate change, the COVID vaccine, critical race theory, and more. I invite you to these Franciscan Prayers to begin to posture yourself towards loving those who disagree with you that you might reflect His Kingdom more fully. And some other great resources along these lines we’ve mentioned before are Rich Villodas’ book The Deeply Formed Life, along with the episodes of Shake the Dust featuring pastors Villodas and Chuck Armstrong.
Sy’s recommendations:
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Nixon’s announcement of the war on drugs, which we have thus far decidedly lost, and at great price. The AP has a piece summarizing some of the damage that initiative has done. As the article notes, one of the lasting legacies of the war is the enormous increase in ever more militarized police officers in disproportionately Black and brown communities. So I thought I would take the occasion to give some examples of a few ways people are experimenting with removing police from communities in an attempt to decrease violence and other kinds of harm they cause. The city of Eugene, Oregan has, since 1989, had a quite successful program for diverting calls about mental health crises away from the police and toward teams of people trained in handling mental health crises. In 2019, there were about 24,000 911 calls diverted to those teams, only about 0.6% of which ended in calls for police back-up. Other cities like New York and Denver are running pilots building off of that success, connecting people in crisis with resources and services, rather than psych wards and jails. Similarly, a few cities are trying to decrease the police presence in public transportation, where most of their job is to criminalize homeless riders and fair evaders (if you click on that link, note the testimony of NYPD officers who were explicitly instructed to racially profile in the subways). Finally, a lot of police work is dedicated to enforcing minor traffic rules, causing many advocates to argue that we don’t need so many people with guns and a license to kill on the road. The inevitable result are cases like the tragic death of Daunte Wright, and this article details a few of the attempts of government officials to preemptively deescalate those encounters by creating new unarmed traffic law enforcement positions or limiting what traffic laws the police enforce. All of these efforts are hopefully just the beginning of a serious attempt to transform how we understand and create public safety.
There was a very well-written essay on Longreads.com called “I Miss it All” recently that I wanted to share with you because, aside from being a refreshingly empathetic and vulnerable piece, it touches on a number of themes we discuss in this newsletter and on Shake the Dust. The author is a runner and NYC public school teacher who injured his leg and writes about finding himself to be a burden to others and losing his sense of value in his suddenly less productive and less efficient life. This is against the backdrop of the pandemic and the isolation it created for us all. But the grace and love he finds in his injured state makes him reflect on the ways we commoditize community, selling each other easier and easier ways to interact with people, but avoiding the inconvenience of connection. I would recommend sitting down with this one and a drink, and just thinking for a while.
Shake the Dust preview
This week on Shake the Dust, we have the first half of a two-part interview with Kyle J. Howard, a theologian, preacher, and counselor to people who have experienced spiritual and racial trauma. We talk to him about what spiritual and racial trauma are exactly, his approach to counseling in a Christian context, the devastating effects of incompetent or uninformed counseling in many churches, how and why he talks about race in interracial couples counseling, his experience as a Black man going to a white seminary, how white supremacy plays itself out in the deconstruction movement, and a lot more.
Extra
Finally, on a somber note, the US lost two civil rights icons recently. Gloria Richardson and Bob Moses died at age 99 and 86 respectively. Both were incredibly brave people who did not compromise with injustice or give in to the draw of celebrity. Moses was also a professor of Sy’s. It is more than worth your time to learn about their life and thinking. The links above are to obituaries that have references to books where you can learn even more.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week.
The KTF team