Jennings, Willie James. After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Eerdmans, 2020.

Abstract

Arising from nearly three decades of experience in theological education, including 10 years as academic dean at Duke Divinity School and current Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School, Jennings describes this work as an "extended essay" aimed at sharing "Secrets" (the title of the prologue) of theological education, engaged in a kind of "… institutional Gnosticism, revealing the hidden meaning in the words, actions, counteractions, and conversations that constitute theological academic life" (2020, p. 25). His analysis is especially attentive to those who pass through theological education but who do not conform to its telos of producing an "educated" person.Through a combination of poetry, story and searching prose this work is a disorienting, wise, prophetic, generous, and vulnerable exposition of the possibility of theological education's future, beyond the distorting formation of whiteness. Moving through the work felt like an immersive baptism in which I was not sure whether I was going to drown under the weight of his haunting analysis or emerge "saved"-a new creation! Avoiding the temptation to be drawn into theological education's obsessive focus on "decline" (although he does not shy from some very "practical" questions that pester theological education institutions today), he is clear that the deeper and more important crisis to attend to is the distortion that animates theological education. He spends the rest of the book attempting to show what this distortion is and how it is "woven into [our] theological institutions and into our deepest pedagogical impulses" (2020, p. 14).Jennings argues, building on his magisterial work in The Christian Imagination: Christian Theology and the Origins