Readings in Race and The Christian Imagination

These days there's so much talk about ethnicity, culture, nationalism, race, and the church that I am increasingly drawn back to what I've learned from Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter in this regard. Recalling that I had at one time shared excerpts and reflections from each of their works on this blog, I thought I would collect links to them in one place for future reference. Perhaps this may also serve as a primer for those who might be interested to look into these matters further.

Reflections on or related to Willie Jennings' The Christian Imagination:

• Willie Jennings' Social Imagination
  
  "This book attempts to narrate exactly what is missing, what thwarts the deepest reality of the Christian social imagination. Indeed, I argue here that Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination.... Christianity, wherever it went in the modern colonies, inverted its sense of hospitality. It claimed to be the host, the owner of the spaces it entered, and demanded native people enter its cultural logics, its ways of being in the world, and its conceptualities. [These] are ways of being in the world that resist the realities of submission, desire, and transformation. A Christianity born of such realities but historically formed to resist them has yielded a form of religious life that thwarts its deepest instincts of intimacy... [and fails] to witness to a God who surprises us by love of difference and draws us to new capacities to imagine their reconciliation. Instead, the intimacy that marks Christian history is a painful one, one in which the joining often meant oppression, violence, and death, if not of bodies then most certainly of ways of life, forms of language, and visions of the world. What happened to the original trajectory of intimacy?"
  

• Multi-culture and the Christian Imagination
• Leadership and the Christian Imagination: Always the Host and never the Hosted?
• Questions about Franklin Graham and the Christian Social Imagination
• Solzhenitsyn's Speech and our Fragmented Stories
• The Resurrection of Pastoral Ministry 
• Church in World: Willie Jennings and the Christian Social Imagination 

Readings in J. Kameron Carter's "Race: A Theological Account"

• Prelude
  
  "The ancient Gnostics thus ended up with a nonmaterial Christ ... lacking interhuman and interlinguistic Jewish flesh, flesh that was not embedded in the history of Israel.... [Here] I tell the story of how the loss of a Jewish-inflected account ... of Christian identity cleared the way for whiteness to function as a replacement doctrine of creation. Hence, the world was re-created from the colonial conquests from the late fifteenth century forward in the image of white dominance, where 'white' signifies not merely pigmentation but a regime of political and economic power for arranging the world."

• Cornel West 
  
• Michel Foucault 
• Immanuel Kant 
• Albert Raboteau 
• James Cone 
• Charles Long 
• Interlude 
• Briton Hammon 
• Frederick Douglass 
• Jarena Lee 
• Postlude