From the Editor's Desk
by Maureen H. O’Connell
Maureen H. O’Connell is associate professor of Christian ethics and chair of the department of religion at La Salle University in her native city of Philadelphia. She is the author of Compassion: Loving our Neighbor in an Age of Globalization (Orbis Books, 2009), and If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (The Liturgical Press, 2012). She is serving as guest editor for this issue of ARTS.
"Stand tall!” the preacher cried out defiantly. “STAND TALL!” we bellowed back. “Lean in,” she resolutely intoned. “LEAN IN,” we affirmed. The congregation of more than 300 Philadelphians fervently repeated this call-and-response three times as we wrestled with the moral imperatives linked with the “Black lives matter” movement during an interfaith service last December.
STAND TALL! LEAN IN. As members of POWER (Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild), an interfaith collective of more than forty congregations, we had gathered to hear some of the city’s best preachers unpack the final words of unarmed African Americans killed by police or their neighbors in the last few years: Trayvon Martin, Amadou Dialo, Oscar Grant, Renisha McBride, Shantel Davis, John Crawford, and Eric Garner. The service was prophetically titled, “Strange Fruit: The Seven Last Words of Seven Black Lives.”
STAND TALL! LEAN IN. Some among us jumped up from our seats. Others clapped. Many shouted “Go on!” or rallied those around them with the reverberations of closed-mouthed affirmations, which traveled the length of the pews in a sanctuary more than a hundred years old. And then Rev. Renee McKenzie, Vicar of the Church of the Advocate and Chaplain at Temple University, delivered her parting words to remember nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride, shot to death on the front porch of a Detroit suburb in September 2014: “Because that’s where God is.”
I suspect the readers of this journal can translate the wisdom of Rev. McKenzie’s words into the context of theological aesthetics with ease. We know, for example, that the arts have long been a place in or by which people, particularly those far from the center of power and socio-economic privilege, have been able to “stand tall.” The arts provide a vehicle for articulating an identity that contradicts those projected onto various groups by the dominant culture. Artistic expression enables people to transcend suffering that happens at the hands of others through the processes of meaning making. Creativity is a form of agency, indeed moral agency, which makes a way out of no way.
Many of us are also aware of the arts as a conduit for the alluring quality of beauty. In fact, it would not be a stretch to equate beauty with a “lean-in-ness” that de-centers us or re-positions us with unexpected insight, perspective, emotion, or ecstasy. In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Martha Nussbaum builds on her longstanding endorsement of the arts, particularly those that capture the tragedies of the human condition, because they provide much-needed opportunities to lean in to other human beings with our imaginations, a moral capacity which allows us to relinquish our desire for control and move instead toward emotions essential for justice such as empathy, compassion, and love. In a theological sense we know from Richard Vilaedesau’s work on the contradictory beauty of the cross or from Alejandro Garcia Rivera’s notion of beauty as that which moves the human heart that the arts are catalysts for conversion, a kind of leaning into the ongoing process of shifting personal values, or desires, or frameworks that precipitate social transformation. Pope Francis acknowledges as much in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelli Gaudium, when he notes that if we want a radically inclusive approach to evangelization, then “the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary.” And finally, many of us might agree that the arts are nothing if not an encounter with something more than the self or something even deep within it. Many readers of and contributors to this journal consider the arts to be, in Rev. McKenzie’s words, “where God is.”
But as we celebrate a variety of fiftieth anniversaries of the Civil Rights Movement (the original impetus for this special issue), and do so in the midst of a racial awakening on the part of white Americans as to why the #blacklivesmatter movement has dominated our national consciousness since August 2014 (which sharpened our focus in this issue on critical race theory), we should be wary of easy connections we might make between Rev. McKenzie’s prophetic words and our discipline. After all, by many accounts it would be easy to dismiss any correlation between beauty or theological or religiously inspired creative expression and the tragic deaths of far too many unarmed African Americans. But too often, the ease and familiarity with which many of us live our lives or teach our students or participate in our liturgies or express our creativity or contribute to the discipline of theological aesthetics sustains the status quo, which accepts these deaths and the persistent racial inequality to which they point as givens in America. And while the resourcefulness of God and the resilient spirit of oppressed communities may allow for encounters with the divine within the status quo, that place is far from the mountaintop that God inspired in the dreams that King the theologian and orator prophesied fifty years ago.
Ease and familiarity preclude the vigilance we need about cultural conditions that either render it too hard for some to stand up or too easy for others to remain in their seats. Ease and familiarity can narrow our scope of vision, blinding us to the risks that many take when leaning in, or cause us to underestimate the resources we might have to contribute to those efforts thereby sharing the risk. Ease and familiarity can leave us with a false sense of direction, leading us to assume that we already know what it is that we need to move away from and/or just how we ought to shift the weight of our influence. Ease and familiarity can also rob us of hope that something entirely new and unfamiliar is actually possible or even already underway.
Clearly, there are many voices that could be represented in this issue of ARTS and the power I had in deciding who was not to be included was not something that I enjoyed. The more I thought about this power, the more the privileges of my whiteness confronted me and the more uncomfortable I became. And yet that uncomfortably powerful place is where I need to be because that is the space I inhabit as a white woman in America today. Rather than cower with guilt or sit back on my heels in defiant denial, I need to stand tall in my whiteness by taking stock of the privileges it affords me and being accountable to others in my community who do not share them in order to encounter instead what God wants for me and my gifts. And I suspect I’ll only learn that by leaning in and listening to my colleagues, friends, students, and fellow congregants of color, especially those engaged in theological aesthetics, and asking them what they need, and what they need from me, so we can all stand tall and lean in. Some of them are in this issue.
“In the Study,” George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Duquesne University, offers a prophetic philosophical primer on critical race theory rooted in the embodied experiences of unarmed Black males, from a pre-teen in a park in Cleveland to a middle-aged man on the streets of Staten Island. Yancy, who has engaged in discourse with a variety of public intellectuals on racism via The Stone, the philosophy blog in The New York Times, names the dynamics experienced by many of our readers of color, and paints for white readers like myself a picture of the persistent reality of white supremacy in our academic culture.
Aimee Meredith Cox, a former dancer with The Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble and now associate professor of anthropology and African and African American studies at Fordham University, turns our attention in her “In the Studio” essay to the “every day choreography of survival” of young Black girls. Through her work with participants in The BlackLight Project—initially a workshop and performance space for written and spoken word and dance that Cox established for young girls in a shelter in Detroit and which has since expanded to incorporate a variety of forms of artistic and bodily expression in Newark, as well—Cox helps us to see the contributions of young women of color to protest movements of the past and present. She illustrates how we might incorporate the wisdom of their collective narratives and performances of liberation into current practices of social change.
Given that so many of the milestones in the Civil Rights Movement we commemorate are literally in the streets, and in light of awareness of the streets as sanctuaries once again—whether as places of death and mourning, or battle lines of confrontation with an ugly history or stages where people are performing a different future—they are the focal point of our “In the Sanctuary” piece. Malik JM Walker, doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Fordham University, examines the prophetic tradition of the jazz funeral in New Orleans to help us to see that the streets have long been a space of life and death, of mourning and hope. As such, liturgical performance there is theologically and politically significant.
For a historical perspective on the arts and racial justice, “In the Gallery” features associate editor John Shorb’s interview with Kellie Jones, who is associate professor in art history and archaeology and research fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Jones explains some of the pieces of an exhibit she co-curated titled, “Witness: Art & Civil Rights in the 60s,” which premiered at the Brooklyn Museum in the fall and features visual art created during this period. Those prophetic years serve as the muse for two original poems in this issue by Valerie Bridgeman: Walking and Apocalypse/When Freedom Could be Had.
“In the Classroom” is a gallery of sorts as well. A group of nine contributors to a blog called “Race Matters in the Classroom,” hosted by the Wabash Center for Teaching Learning in Theology and Religion, generously shared teaching tactics for engaging questions of racism in their varied classroom contexts. Many are SARTS members and I am grateful for their willingness to share their pedagogical creativity.
In her stunning piece in Salon challenging The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s concerns about “artful falsehoods” in Selma, Brittney Cooper suggests that Ava DuVernay gifts to America a much-needed “new racial lens,” one that “displaces the white gaze,” which Cooper sees as a source of far more dangerous artful falsehoods than those Dowd identifies in the film. DuVernay does this by revealing to us—all of us—what we look like from her perspective. DuVernay “made the film she wanted to make,” Cooper notes, and in so doing “tells us many truths in this film about the affective and emotive dimensions of Black politics, about the intimacy of Black struggle, about the spirit of people intimately acquainted with daily assaults on their humanity.” This issue of ARTS attempts to bring a new racial lens to the field of theological aesthetics by making space for voices like those of DuVernay who can help us to see ourselves and our work from their perspective. Taken together, their contributions here challenge those of us working at the intersection of theology or religion and the arts to remain vigilant for the truth about racial reality in America as revealed to us in the arts, and to ask for the courage to see ourselves in new ways so that we might work with others already converted by the beauty that artistic truth presents, and to move our selves—spirits and bodies—toward the highest and perhaps most beautiful good in America right now: the good of racial justice.
Stand tall. Lean in. Because that’s where God is. —mo’c
Maureen H. O’Connell is associate professor of Christian ethics and chair of the department of religion at La Salle University in her native city of Philadelphia. She is the author of Compassion: Loving our Neighbor in an Age of Globalization (Orbis Books, 2009), and If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (The Liturgical Press, 2012). She is serving as guest editor for this issue of ARTS.
"Stand tall!” the preacher cried out defiantly. “STAND TALL!” we bellowed back. “Lean in,” she resolutely intoned. “LEAN IN,” we affirmed. The congregation of more than 300 Philadelphians fervently repeated this call-and-response three times as we wrestled with the moral imperatives linked with the “Black lives matter” movement during an interfaith service last December.
STAND TALL! LEAN IN. As members of POWER (Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild), an interfaith collective of more than forty congregations, we had gathered to hear some of the city’s best preachers unpack the final words of unarmed African Americans killed by police or their neighbors in the last few years: Trayvon Martin, Amadou Dialo, Oscar Grant, Renisha McBride, Shantel Davis, John Crawford, and Eric Garner. The service was prophetically titled, “Strange Fruit: The Seven Last Words of Seven Black Lives.”
STAND TALL! LEAN IN. Some among us jumped up from our seats. Others clapped. Many shouted “Go on!” or rallied those around them with the reverberations of closed-mouthed affirmations, which traveled the length of the pews in a sanctuary more than a hundred years old. And then Rev. Renee McKenzie, Vicar of the Church of the Advocate and Chaplain at Temple University, delivered her parting words to remember nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride, shot to death on the front porch of a Detroit suburb in September 2014: “Because that’s where God is.”
I suspect the readers of this journal can translate the wisdom of Rev. McKenzie’s words into the context of theological aesthetics with ease. We know, for example, that the arts have long been a place in or by which people, particularly those far from the center of power and socio-economic privilege, have been able to “stand tall.” The arts provide a vehicle for articulating an identity that contradicts those projected onto various groups by the dominant culture. Artistic expression enables people to transcend suffering that happens at the hands of others through the processes of meaning making. Creativity is a form of agency, indeed moral agency, which makes a way out of no way.
Many of us are also aware of the arts as a conduit for the alluring quality of beauty. In fact, it would not be a stretch to equate beauty with a “lean-in-ness” that de-centers us or re-positions us with unexpected insight, perspective, emotion, or ecstasy. In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Martha Nussbaum builds on her longstanding endorsement of the arts, particularly those that capture the tragedies of the human condition, because they provide much-needed opportunities to lean in to other human beings with our imaginations, a moral capacity which allows us to relinquish our desire for control and move instead toward emotions essential for justice such as empathy, compassion, and love. In a theological sense we know from Richard Vilaedesau’s work on the contradictory beauty of the cross or from Alejandro Garcia Rivera’s notion of beauty as that which moves the human heart that the arts are catalysts for conversion, a kind of leaning into the ongoing process of shifting personal values, or desires, or frameworks that precipitate social transformation. Pope Francis acknowledges as much in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelli Gaudium, when he notes that if we want a radically inclusive approach to evangelization, then “the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary.” And finally, many of us might agree that the arts are nothing if not an encounter with something more than the self or something even deep within it. Many readers of and contributors to this journal consider the arts to be, in Rev. McKenzie’s words, “where God is.”
But as we celebrate a variety of fiftieth anniversaries of the Civil Rights Movement (the original impetus for this special issue), and do so in the midst of a racial awakening on the part of white Americans as to why the #blacklivesmatter movement has dominated our national consciousness since August 2014 (which sharpened our focus in this issue on critical race theory), we should be wary of easy connections we might make between Rev. McKenzie’s prophetic words and our discipline. After all, by many accounts it would be easy to dismiss any correlation between beauty or theological or religiously inspired creative expression and the tragic deaths of far too many unarmed African Americans. But too often, the ease and familiarity with which many of us live our lives or teach our students or participate in our liturgies or express our creativity or contribute to the discipline of theological aesthetics sustains the status quo, which accepts these deaths and the persistent racial inequality to which they point as givens in America. And while the resourcefulness of God and the resilient spirit of oppressed communities may allow for encounters with the divine within the status quo, that place is far from the mountaintop that God inspired in the dreams that King the theologian and orator prophesied fifty years ago.
Ease and familiarity preclude the vigilance we need about cultural conditions that either render it too hard for some to stand up or too easy for others to remain in their seats. Ease and familiarity can narrow our scope of vision, blinding us to the risks that many take when leaning in, or cause us to underestimate the resources we might have to contribute to those efforts thereby sharing the risk. Ease and familiarity can leave us with a false sense of direction, leading us to assume that we already know what it is that we need to move away from and/or just how we ought to shift the weight of our influence. Ease and familiarity can also rob us of hope that something entirely new and unfamiliar is actually possible or even already underway.
Clearly, there are many voices that could be represented in this issue of ARTS and the power I had in deciding who was not to be included was not something that I enjoyed. The more I thought about this power, the more the privileges of my whiteness confronted me and the more uncomfortable I became. And yet that uncomfortably powerful place is where I need to be because that is the space I inhabit as a white woman in America today. Rather than cower with guilt or sit back on my heels in defiant denial, I need to stand tall in my whiteness by taking stock of the privileges it affords me and being accountable to others in my community who do not share them in order to encounter instead what God wants for me and my gifts. And I suspect I’ll only learn that by leaning in and listening to my colleagues, friends, students, and fellow congregants of color, especially those engaged in theological aesthetics, and asking them what they need, and what they need from me, so we can all stand tall and lean in. Some of them are in this issue.
“In the Study,” George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Duquesne University, offers a prophetic philosophical primer on critical race theory rooted in the embodied experiences of unarmed Black males, from a pre-teen in a park in Cleveland to a middle-aged man on the streets of Staten Island. Yancy, who has engaged in discourse with a variety of public intellectuals on racism via The Stone, the philosophy blog in The New York Times, names the dynamics experienced by many of our readers of color, and paints for white readers like myself a picture of the persistent reality of white supremacy in our academic culture.
Aimee Meredith Cox, a former dancer with The Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble and now associate professor of anthropology and African and African American studies at Fordham University, turns our attention in her “In the Studio” essay to the “every day choreography of survival” of young Black girls. Through her work with participants in The BlackLight Project—initially a workshop and performance space for written and spoken word and dance that Cox established for young girls in a shelter in Detroit and which has since expanded to incorporate a variety of forms of artistic and bodily expression in Newark, as well—Cox helps us to see the contributions of young women of color to protest movements of the past and present. She illustrates how we might incorporate the wisdom of their collective narratives and performances of liberation into current practices of social change.
Given that so many of the milestones in the Civil Rights Movement we commemorate are literally in the streets, and in light of awareness of the streets as sanctuaries once again—whether as places of death and mourning, or battle lines of confrontation with an ugly history or stages where people are performing a different future—they are the focal point of our “In the Sanctuary” piece. Malik JM Walker, doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Fordham University, examines the prophetic tradition of the jazz funeral in New Orleans to help us to see that the streets have long been a space of life and death, of mourning and hope. As such, liturgical performance there is theologically and politically significant.
For a historical perspective on the arts and racial justice, “In the Gallery” features associate editor John Shorb’s interview with Kellie Jones, who is associate professor in art history and archaeology and research fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Jones explains some of the pieces of an exhibit she co-curated titled, “Witness: Art & Civil Rights in the 60s,” which premiered at the Brooklyn Museum in the fall and features visual art created during this period. Those prophetic years serve as the muse for two original poems in this issue by Valerie Bridgeman: Walking and Apocalypse/When Freedom Could be Had.
“In the Classroom” is a gallery of sorts as well. A group of nine contributors to a blog called “Race Matters in the Classroom,” hosted by the Wabash Center for Teaching Learning in Theology and Religion, generously shared teaching tactics for engaging questions of racism in their varied classroom contexts. Many are SARTS members and I am grateful for their willingness to share their pedagogical creativity.
In her stunning piece in Salon challenging The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s concerns about “artful falsehoods” in Selma, Brittney Cooper suggests that Ava DuVernay gifts to America a much-needed “new racial lens,” one that “displaces the white gaze,” which Cooper sees as a source of far more dangerous artful falsehoods than those Dowd identifies in the film. DuVernay does this by revealing to us—all of us—what we look like from her perspective. DuVernay “made the film she wanted to make,” Cooper notes, and in so doing “tells us many truths in this film about the affective and emotive dimensions of Black politics, about the intimacy of Black struggle, about the spirit of people intimately acquainted with daily assaults on their humanity.” This issue of ARTS attempts to bring a new racial lens to the field of theological aesthetics by making space for voices like those of DuVernay who can help us to see ourselves and our work from their perspective. Taken together, their contributions here challenge those of us working at the intersection of theology or religion and the arts to remain vigilant for the truth about racial reality in America as revealed to us in the arts, and to ask for the courage to see ourselves in new ways so that we might work with others already converted by the beauty that artistic truth presents, and to move our selves—spirits and bodies—toward the highest and perhaps most beautiful good in America right now: the good of racial justice.
Stand tall. Lean in. Because that’s where God is. —mo’c
