Reconciling to Place
Well, Plundered is out in the world and it’s been a full fun stretch of travel, workshops, preaching, and podcasts. As you might imagine, my margin has been a bit thin this week so rather than sharing a new reflection I’m linking to an article I wrote for Missio Alliance that was published a couple of days ago. But first, a request. If you’ve read enough of Plundered to think that you might like it, could you take 2 minutes to leave an Amazon review. I kinda hope you bought the book elsewhere, but these reviews end up being super important in helping others find it. Thank you!
During the past fifteen years our multi-racial church has lived through many instances of racist trauma: notorious occasions of police brutality, attacks on African American churches, women murdered because of their ethnic identities, xenophobic rhetoric and policies, and more. These don’t include the less blatant, more local expressions of our racialized society; school funding formulas, housing costs and gentrification, and proximity to toxic waste and polluted air are all tainted by the exploitative logic of race.
Each of these spectacular instances and quieter expressions impact the people in our congregation. Attempting to nurture Christ’s reconciliation in our community, while being buffeted by the unpredictable but always looming gusts of racial violence, can feel like we’re just barely holding onto one another.
There are different ways to understand what race is and what it does. Here is one: By categorizing people according to an invented social hierarchy, race disrupts our formational relationship with place. No longer is it God’s good creation which makes a people who they are; now it is the devilish logic of the racial hierarchy which organizes our place and purpose in the world.
Typically, our racial reconciliation paradigms have accounted for how race separates individuals and groups from one another. Ministries committed to reconciliation work to understand histories of segregation and supremacy and how those legacies continue to exert their influence. These ministries admirably make room to learn those in their communities who have been most overlooked and harmed by the racial hierarchy. The goal is to close the segregating gap, to allow the God “who reconciled us to himself through Christ” to reconcile racialized people to one another (2 Corinthians 5:18).
More recently, reconciliation ministries have also begun accounting for the extractive purpose of race. By identifying some people as more or less human, race justifies theft. We live in the aftermath of land and labor stolen from people whose position on the racial hierarchy consigned their communities to kidnapping, enslavement, and genocide.
In our supposedly colorblind, society, the racial kleptocracy has evolved into subtler expressions. For example, in Race for Profit Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has shown how, after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited lending institutions from excluding buyers of color, banks adopted a policy which Taylor describes as “predatory inclusion.” Armed with federally insured loans, banks targeted Black communities with risky mortgages for substandard housing. Defaulted mortgages were backed by the federal government ensuring that banks could place the dilapidated housing back on the market. Having been previously excluded from the housing market, African American communities were now included for the same extractive purposes.
Paradigms that reconcile previously segregated people are good. Even better are ministries which understand the widescale theft which race has justified. Such communities will invite communities into loving relationship while reckoning with power differentials and legacies of material plunder. Yet for all of the good done by this sort of reconciliation, it misses one of the fundamental impacts of race and thus misses an opportunity for deeper, more holistic, and lasting reconciliation.
Continue reading at Missio Alliance…
Hey South Bend!
If you’re anywhere near South Bend, IN I hope you’ll come out on Sunday, November 3 for a conversation with some really thoughtful friends.
Plundered Updates
This review in the Hearts and Minds newsletter was so encouraging.
What are the Biblical and theological resources we have in our faith communities to create practices of creation care and racial justice in our own places? Plundered does help us understand the problem but, more, digging deep into the idols of greed that have deformed our place in the world, invites us to ways to reverse the urgent situation.
CCDA featured an excerpt from the book on their website.
Though we have become accustomed to the ungodly assumptions that consign some places and people to scattering and splintering harm, God’s creational intent wakes us up to the intertwining relationships that are meant to hold all things and people together so that everything and everyone might flourish. It is the harmony for which we were created, more than anything else, which ought to elicit our curious concern when we notice that some people and places have been excluded from the Creator’s gifts.
The Englewood Review of Books shared a different excerpt.
How God redirected me from a life outdoors to pastoral ministry in the third-largest city in the country is something that still astonishes me. My wife, Maggie, and I still joke about how different our life together has been than what either of us could have imagined when we were married in a chapel nestled in the Appalachian hills. Over the years, as our church has learned to worship together and serve with our neighbors, I’ve occasionally wondered about the connection between my concern for creation and my call to the ministry of racial justice and reconciliation. To be honest, the differences between the two often seemed incompatible to my uncreative mind.
The View From Here
While in Portland last week I slipped away from the conference for a couple of hours to visit Powell’s Books. Because what sort of a weirdo visits Portland without paying homage to one of our country’s great bookstores? I recently watched a documentary about the relationship between Robert Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb so I asked a bookseller about Caro’s first book, The Power Broker. I mostly just wanted to page through it but because the employee spent about 30 minutes ransacking the store to find a copy I felt (happily) obligated to buy it. And that’s how I came to lug a 1,344 page tome from Portland to Spokane to Chicago. It’ll be worth it, right?