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Abstract
To live is to be vulnerable. The fact of our fragility has been laid bare in some of the crises we face in public life in the United States: an uncontained pandemic, relentless racist violence, and persistent and worsening ecological loss. This essay argues that although education has sometimes promised (even obliquely) an economic, political, or even spiritual escape from vulnerability, religious education should instead nurture loving awareness of vulnerability and, in light of that knowledge, the resilience and courage to love the world.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Katlyn Zulinke, my research assistant who helped identify some of the conversation partners that appear in these pages.
Notes
1 Ronald Heifetz has helpfully distinguished between strategic and adaptive challenges. An adaptive challenge, Heifetz argues, “involves not only the assessment of reality, but also the clarification of values” (Heifetz Citation1998, 31). For the purposes of this essay, I find the language of adaptation to be somewhat limited, however. Paulo Freire, for example, worried that the call to adaptation might constrain learners’ imagination of the possibility of social transformation (Freire Citation1982, 76).
2 Butler refers here to primary vulnerability between humans, particularly as expressed in political conflict and violence. Given, however, that primary vulnerability “emerges with life, itself,” before the emergence of consciousness, some ecological scholars expand the concept to include ecological relationships (Cunsolo Citation2017; Sandilands, Citation2017).
3 Here, I paint with very broad brush the histories of racism and exploitation that shape U.S. political culture. Each of these examples have roots and branches far more complex than I can describe here. See, for example, work by Ibram X. Kendi (Citation2016) and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Citation2014).
4 While I was writing this article, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 43 seconds while bystanders cried for him to stop. This incident of police violence, though one of many, in the summer of 2020 lent new urgency to the Black Lives Matter movement that began after the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 (Hauser, Bryson Taylor, and Vigdor Citation2020).
5 The concluding paragraphs of this essay, including this quote, were likely an editorial addition from another of Leopold’s unpublished writings. This version of the essay appears in the Round River collection of essays published posthumously. Meine (Citation2013, 867) explains the tracing of the origin of the words in his “Note on the Texts and Illustrations.”
6 Tutu (Citation1999, 274) called this a “delicate network of interdependence.” Suchocki (Citation1995) also drew on process theological conceptions of interdependence to explain the perpetuation of suffering and harm.
7 The term “escape velocity,” which technically refers to the speed an object must achieve to break free from gravitational pull, has been employed as a metaphor for educational and economic success. For example, Fryer and Katz (Citation2013, 232–7) use the metaphor to title their article on education’s potential to reduce inequity.
8 Willie Jennings has argued that these values and worldview—which he describes as “white self-sufficient masculinity”—have long shaped even theological education in the United States, founded as it is upon Western European ideals. He writes, “White self-sufficient masculinity is not first a person or a people; it is a way of organizing life with ideas and forming a persona that distorts identity and strangles the possibility of dense life together” (2020, 8–9).
9 This tension would persist in the desegregation of schools in the second half of the 20th century. After the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision—followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964—made school segregation illegal, the long process of desegregating schools failed to develop curricula and cultures that reflected and valued increasingly diverse student bodies. Although the discrepancies in segregated schooling were deeply unjust, many Black students also experienced profound loss and grief upon leaving their schools and teachers who looked like them and cared about their humanity (hooks Citation1994, 3–4). Black students who now attended ostensibly “better” majority white schools were still pressured to assimilate to white cultural and intellectual values. This is why Kendi (Citation2016, 361–3) argues that assimilationism is a racist solution to racial injustice.
10 Although religious education is a very broad category, in this essay I have held in mind the ways in which religious communities are sites of theological and social formation, in both formal educational settings and through more informal faith practices.
11 Here, Niebuhr responds to what he perceived as a materialist interpretation of Christianity’s promise of the “fullness of life” articulated in the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America’s statement, “The Churches and the World Order.”
12 Historical accounts demonstrate what might be described as assimilationist Christian educational efforts among indigenous populations. See, for example, Ted Hinckley’s chronicle (1968) of missionary S. Hall Young’s evangelization and “civilization” efforts among indigenous populations in late nineteenth century Alaska.
13 James Estep and Kevin Lawson argue that Christian education must maintain an anticipatory orientation toward and prepare believers for a “journey… upward and forward into eternity” (2015, 296). Importantly, they also note that eschatologically-grounded Christian education also serves as a balm and hope for those who suffer (289).
14 Kate Bowler, scholar of the prosperity gospel, experienced this profoundly when she was in treatment for stage IV colon cancer: “At a time when I should have felt abandoned by God, I was not reduced to ashes. I felt like I was floating, floating on the love and prayers of all those who hummed around me …and mirrored back to me the face of Jesus. …When they sat beside me, my hands in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others…” (2018, 121).
15 It is important to note, here, that religious education for precarity does not set, as its goal, a facile or passive acceptance of suffering, particularly the suffering and harm that result from systemic oppression. Freire (Citation1982, 63) argued that pedagogies that encourage learners to “adapt” to the conditions in which they live serves as a strategy to disable critical thinking and preserve oppressive class structures.
16 Mary Elizabeth Moore also describes the work that story-telling can do as “remembering the dismembered—rehearsing the stories of people and parts of creation in which destructive forces have taken away some or all of their life” (2004, 79).
17 Joanna Macy has written about this connection, as Andy Fisher describes: “Pain for the world is a political phenomenon calling us back to this earth, not a divine punishment prompting us to escape it” (2020, 92).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jennifer R. Ayres
Jennifer Ayres is Associate Professor of Religious Education and Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Email: [email protected]