Hi everybody,
We hope you all got the chance to enjoy our Shake the Dust episode with Milly Silencio last Friday. If not, give it a listen. It was a really fascinating and fun conversation. And now, here are this week’s highlights to help us leave colonized faith for the Kingdom of God.
Jonathan’s recommendations:
If you don’t follow J. S. Park on Instagram or have his book, The Voices We Carry, you should! This Instagram carousel is worth your time and attention. Park describes a tension, struggle, and consistent dissonance of following a perfect Christ while being a member of an imperfect and sometimes oppressive community of Christians. Through the photos and captions he models a willingness to consistently confess, lament, repent, and remain in community. Followers of Jesus must confess where we have been complicit, lament the impact and suffering we have caused, turn away from harmful practices to pursue redemption, and stay in the Body. The world needs more witnesses like Park who are willing to name the nonsense and hypocrisy and call for righteousness and justice from inside the Church on behalf of those outside of it.
Behind every social movement is a group of people with names, faces, stories, and backgrounds. One of the people behind the movement upending school board meetings nationwide in an attempt to cancel woke teachers and CRT is Will Estrada, the leader of ParentalRights.org. First Person, a podcast from The New York Times, profiled him in last week’s episode. I believe that if we truly are to leave colonized faith for the kingdom of God we have to understand where people like Will are coming from, consider their influences, and refuse to reduce them to the political positions that they hold. This is especially true when they profess that their views come from the same Savior I claim to follow. Listening to my neighbors is the first step towards loving them.
Suzie’s recommendations:
In honor of both Juneteenth and Father’s Day, the pastor of my church, Rev. Dr. Willie Bodrick II, delivered a moving sermon this past Sunday entitled, “They Didn’t Tell the Whole Story.” In it, he references a 2015 New York Times op-ed that reveals the statistical deception propping up the mythology of the Absent Black Father. The bottom line: Black fathers are just as much, if not more, present in the lives of their kids as any other racial demographic in America. The defining difference is that many of them have been stripped from their children by the scourge of mass incarceration. As the author, Charles Blow writes, “[m]ass incarceration has disproportionately ensnared young black men, sucking hundreds of thousands of marriage-age men out of the community.” You can listen to Rev. Bodrick’s full sermon here, starting at 1:04. For an additional resource, Pass the Mic has a powerful episode on this subject as well.
Last week, the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) Synod voted to elevate the non-affirming position of its Human Sexuality Report to confessional status, solidifying it as core CRC doctrine. This move has sent shockwaves not only throughout the denomination, but also across the campus of its flagship school, Calvin University. In response to the move, renowned Calvin Professor and New York Times Bestselling author Kristin Kobes Du Mez (also a former guest on Shake the Dust) posted this HuffPost article on what happened to a Calvin professor who officiated a queer wedding as a helpful window into how exactly this change happened. She also published a blog post sharing her own thoughts on the decision. Both pieces are a microcosm of the culture wars around LGBTQ issues within churches and denominations across the country. It’s a story in which the walls of the church are suddenly and brutally defined, keeping some inside while freezing others out.
Sy’s recommendations:
Yesterday, there was a really good article in the New York Times Magazine about the history of the publishing world’s attempts to diversify itself over the past 60 years or so. It takes readers from the incredibly wealthy, white origins of the major companies through multiple pushes for editors to consider Black readers as a serious market. We learn of countless books for Black audiences that found enormous success after white agents rejected them. But those agents always manage to dismiss the sales as a fluke or a flash in the pan. The author tells stories like the 19 years during which this trend started to disappear almost solely because Toni Morrison was working for Random House, only to return when she left. The article is an in-depth exploration of how racism and whiteness shape whose words we think are important, and whose needs our markets see fit to address.
Rose J. Percy is a Haitian-American writer and theologian. She’s also the host of the Dear Soft Black Woman podcast. Follow those links to learn more about her because she’s great. But what I’m actually recommending today is the cohort she will be leading soon on Black-centered deconstruction, which she introduces on her Substack page here. A lot of BIPOC have identified that the recent “deconstruction” movement to break down American Christianity and figure out where it went wrong is a very white movement. Percy is doing her part to change that. She’s giving Black Christians the chance to learn and grow in an environment where they don’t have to constantly translate experiences and explain themselves, and others the chance to relearn faith with a different culture at the center. At that link is also a button where people can donate to help subsidize the cost for people who want to participate in the cohort.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
The KTF team