Sameer Yadav comments on Howard Thurman's Civil Rights Theology, Ryan McAnnally-Linz reflects on the spiritual and moral significance of David Walker's "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," and Stacey Floyd-Thomas talks about racial oppression via vicious humility and the life-giving dignity of Black joy. #BlackHistoryMonth
Sameer Yadav comments on Howard Thurman's Civil Rights Theology, Ryan McAnnally-Linz reflects on the spiritual and moral significance of David Walker's "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," and Stacey Floyd-Thomas talks about racial oppression via vicious humility and the life-giving dignity of Black joy. #BlackHistoryMonth
Show Notes
Production Notes
About Sameer Yadav
Sameer Yadav (Th.D. Duke Divinity School) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA. His research areas are in the philosophy and theology of religious experience, race and religion, and the theological interpretation of Scripture. He is the author of The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God: Toward a Theological Empiricism (Fortress Press, 2015), a number of articles published in various journals such as The Journal of Analytic Theology, Faith and Philosophy, and The Journal of Religion among others, as well as a number of chapters in edited volumes.
About Stacey Floyd Thomas
Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Associate Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University, and is a nationally recognized scholar and leading voice in social ethics who provides leadership to several national and international organizations that educate, advocate, support and shape the strategic work of individuals, initiatives, and institutions in their organizing efforts of championing and cultivating equity, diversity, and inclusion via organizations such as Black Religious Scholars Group (BRSG), Society for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Religion (SRER), Strategic Effective Ethical Solutions (SEES), Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR). She holds a PhD in Ethics, a MBA in organizational behavior and two Masters in Comparative religion and Theological Studies with certification in women’s studies, cultural studies, and counseling. Not only has she published seven books and numerous articles, she is also as an expert in leadership development, an executive coach and ordained clergy equipped with business management. As a result, Floyd-Thomas has been a lead architect in helping corporations, colleges, universities, religious congregations, and community organizations with their audit, assessment, and action plans in accordance with evolving both the mission and strategic plans. Without question, she is one of the nation’s leading voices in ethical leadership in the United States and is globally recognized for her scholarly specializations in liberation theology and ethics, critical race theory, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial studies. Additionally, leaving podium and pulpit, she hosts her own podcast to popularize and make her profession and vocation intergenerationally and intracommunally accessible through The Womanist Salon Podcast.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Stacy Floyd Thomas: I am black and beautiful. So black joy is to say that I, too, am made in the image of God. My life, in its physicality and essence, is good.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living the life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. To celebrate the beginning of this Black History Month, and in keeping with our recent collection of highlights from our first 100 shows, let's dive back into some of the discussions of black history and black theology that we've had on the show. We'll listen to clips from our interviews with social ethicist Stacy Floyd Thomas and Sameer Yadav, as well as YCFC's own, Ryan McAnnally-Linz. First, from episode 54, Sameer Yadav discusses the development and impact of black theologian Howard Thurman's career, which heavily influenced the Civil Rights Movement.
Sameer Yadav: I think that in order to understand the profound power of Thurman's contribution to Christian theology, we need to understand his life and his thought as a way of keeping faith with three of his earliest religious experiences. And the first was a sense of belonging to a mysterious unity shared between all living things. He describes himself as a shy and inward youth who felt a deep sense of communion with nature. And he recalls times of feeling a sense of fellowship and even conversation with the trees he would sit under. And second, along with this deep sense of connectedness, Thurman's upbringing also included a traumatic sense of alienation that came from his daily experiences of the brutality of Jim Crow segregation. Third, he experienced the vitality of Christian faith that was passed down to him from his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. She had grown up in enslaved on a plantation and later she gained her freedom and she introduced Thurman to a deep reservoir of black Christian resistance to slaveholder Christianity, and a way of identifying with the meaning of Jesus for the oppressed, one that put black Christian faith in touch with the dignity of our common humanity, as it was revealed by Jesus. The humanity we share with Jesus is one that cannot be reduced or dominated, but holds a value in union with God that goes beyond any attempt we can make to manipulate it for our own purposes. And Thurman's career as a minister and a theologian was a lifelong journey of bringing these three themes together and seeing how they interacted with one another: a divine common ground shared by all living things, the devastating effects of social injustice on human personhood, and sharing in the humanity of Jesus uniquely revealed in the history of black suffering and the resilience of black joy. An underlying theme that was developing in Thurman's thought, was that Christian mystical practices and Christian social activism are not opposed to one another, with mysticism being some matter of private experience or inward spiritual life while social activism is about, uh, the outward public discourse and political agency that we exercise against injustice. Instead, he thought that the two belonged in vital connection with one another, and the crucible of this thought, was his engagement with black Christian experience and tradition. So from 1944 to 1953, Thurman left his tenured position and sought out a kind of 'how to work out' the catholicity or shared humanity that he found in the life of Jesus. And he came to pastor the first interracial and intercultural church community of its kind, the Fellowship of Reconciliation of All Peoples, in San Francisco. And then in 1953, he accepted an invitation,he left there and accepted an invitation to become the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston university. And there he had a profound impact on Martin Luther King Jr. King was there doing his doctoral program and he was reputed to carry around on his speaking trips, a dog-eared copy of Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited. And to the day of his death in 1981, Thurman continued to work out this interconnection between Christian conceptions of mystical union and Christian social imagination, always informed uniquely by the race-based injustice that uniquely shapes our society. So I'll close with a quote from the preface of a book called Luminous Darkness, which is a book Thurman published in 1960. And it aims to diagnose the American racial and economic segregation that we experience and what it does to our common humanity. So Thurman says this in the preface to that book. "The fact that the first 23 years of my life were spent in Florida and Georgia, has left its scars deep in my spirit and has rendered me terribly sensitive to the turning abyss separating a white from black. Living outside of the region, I'm aware of the national span of racial prejudice, the virus of segregation that undermines the vitality of American life. Nevertheless, a strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact, what is experienced as literal truth. Human life is one, and all humans are members of one another, and this insight is spiritual and it is the hard core of religious experience. My roots are deep in the throbbing reality of Negro idiom. And from it, I draw a full measure of inspiration and vitality. The slaves made a worthless life, the life of chattle property, a meer thing, a body, worth living, that yielded with abiding enthusiasm to a view of life, which included all the events of their experience without exhausting themselves in those experiences. To them, this quality of life was insistent. Fact, because of that, which deeply was within them, they discovered God, who was not, or could not be, exhausted by any single experience or series of experiences. To know God was to live a life worthy of the loftiest, meaning of life. People of all ages and times slave or free, trained or untutored, who have sensed the same values, are their fellow pilgrims who journey together with them in increasing self-realization, in quest for the city that has foundations whose builder and maker is God."
Evan Rosa: Next, Ryan McAnnally-Linz shares the impact of David Walker on his own theology. Walker was a 19th century, black abolitionist, and activist, who's influence predated the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation by half a century. He died of tuberculosis at age 34, but not before writing his stirring and courageous pamphlet, "An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World."
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Walker's core theological argument is as concise as it is incisive. All human beings belong to God and Christ as their Creator and Redeemer, therefore, no human being can belong to another human. In other words, there is no Lord, but the Lord, no master, but Christ, who, crucially, gave His life for his servants and called them friends. To seek to become anyone's master, to lord your power over another, is to usurp the place that belongs exclusively and absolutely to God, is to claim divinity for yourself. "God gave the Americans a plenty of everything calculated to do them good," Walker writes. "Not satisfied with this, however, they wanted slaves, and wanted us for their slaves who belong to the Holy Ghost and no other, who we shall have to serve instead of tyrants. I say, the Americans want us, the property of the Holy Ghost, to serve them." I take it there are more ways to do that demanding, more ways to want service, than claiming literal ownership in chattle slavery. Something crucial follows from this. It's the kind of thing that sounds a little obvious after the fact, but that's revolutionary, the first time someone puts straight forward words to it. To stop perpetrating injustice is not to do anyone a favor. And it's not a sacrifice in any proper sense. Walker writes, "Should tyrants take into their heads to emancipate any of you, remember that your freedom is your natural right. You were men as well as they, and instead of returning thanks to them for your freedom, return it to the Holy Ghost, who is our rightful owner. You don't get a pat on the back for finally giving up your rank injustice. There's no gratitude owed to you. Slave owners may have felt like emancipation cost them something, but it was in fact only returning stolen goods." Reading Walker on this point, raises this question for me: what in our day do we claim as ours when in fact it belongs to God? But more specifically, and honestly more to the point in reading Walker, where do I find myself clinging to racial privilege as though it were rightfully mine? And where do I find myself looking for gratitude from black Americans for doing only what obedience to God requires? I really can't recommend David Walker's appeal strongly enough. It's a breathtaking read and it's fairly short. You can finish it in an afternoon or a couple of evenings. And you'll come away better for having done so.
And for our final highlight this week, social ethicist, Stacy Floyd Thomas comments on the womanist perspective of humility that, far from being a virtue, humility has too often been weaponized to keep the oppressed oppressed and to keep the powerful powerful. She goes on to share about the distinctive beauty of black joy, which the world didn't give, and the world can't take away.
Stacy Floyd Thomas: I remember in the, growing up in the eighties, when people would say, why do we have a Black History Month? That seems unfair. We don't have a white history month. No! The whole calendar belongs to white people. So, do you see what I'm saying? So, if you look at it through a solipsistic point of view, it would say, oh, how proud it is, or how selfish it is to, to take ownership of an entire month. Right? If you're going to look at it through that white solipsistic gaze, sure, that's what it seems like. But that is in the context of a world where the whole entire calendar belongs to white people. When I go into CVS, that's across the street from my school, and if I'm looking for haircare products for my daughter or myself on the way of, you know, doing the quick stop on the way home, I am not going to find hair care products for my daughter and myself there. Which means, the students who are, who are enrolled and matriculating at Vanderbilt, who are also African-American, they're not going to find what they need there. The students who are Thai, or who are Chinese, or who are, uh, a Sri Lankan. They can't go to Kroger, and readily find all the ingredients to make up the dishes that nourish their, their palette. Right? And so that, in and of itself, states that what is needed for your flourishing, what is needed for your day to day survival and maintenance does not matter. So, in light of those few analogies, what I'm trying to say is that humility, normatively, is a disservice as a virtue. It actually is a sin. It's a vice, and it's a vice grip that normative Christian theology projects onto its majority representation of the humanism, or the Christian fellowship, of the Church.
Um, black joy, well, it's best represented in my, in my mind from a song that's oftentimes sung in the black church, that "this joy that I have, this joy that I have, the world didn't give it. And the world can't take it away." Doing the correction to the transliteration of the, the King James version of Song of Songs, one, five, and six, King James version says, "I'm black, but beautiful, oh ye daughters of Jerusalem, do not resent me or gaze upon me because the sun has chosen to favor, favorably shine upon me." But we know when we look at an appropriate transliteration and we see the Newly Revised Standard Version, actually, the 'but' was used to cancel out the 'and' that was intended as a contextual reading of what the scripture conveys. So in the, in the RSB version, and we understand the passage to say, 'I am black and beautiful.' Beauty, which is virtue, normatively understood, in Western notions, even in Christian traditions, has been the opposite of blackness. So black joy is to say that I, too, am made in the image of God. My life, in its physicality and essence, is good. To know joy is to be certain in one's thinking, doing, and being. That your joy does not exact oppression from another. Rather that your joy brings joy and abundant light to all who have engaged you, no matter where you are on the road to salvation. True joy, being a real thinking person of faith, is not only realizing that the life that you may save might be your own, but it is also to know clearly that there is no divine justice that is not linked to social justice and that the work of the gospel, the work of the Church, the work of Christianity is the work of Jesus. It is the work of knowing that we can save souls without losing our minds or losing or lynching the lives of others in the process. Our work has to be not only salvific, but sane and live saving.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Sameer Yadav with an appreciation of Howard Thurman, Ryan McAnnally-Linz with an appreciation of David Walker, and social ethicist, Stacy Floyd Thomas. Editorial and production assistance by Logan Ledman.
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