Willie James Jennings has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 1 narrator, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is The Christian Imagination.
The Christian Imagination
Summary
Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation - social, spatial, and racial - that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race.
©2010 Yale University (P)2020 Tantor
After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging
Summary
Theological education has always been about formation: first, of people; then, of communities; then, of the world. If we continue to promote Whiteness and its related ideas of masculinity and individualism in our educational work, it will remain diseased and thwart our efforts to heal the church and the world. But if theological education aims to form people who can gather others together through border-crossing pluralism and God-drenched communion, we can begin to cultivate the radical belonging that is at the heart of God’s transformative work. In this book, Willie James Jennings shares the insights gained from his extensive experience in theological education, most notably as the dean of a major university’s divinity school - where he remains one of the only African Americans to have ever served in that role. He reflects on the distortions hidden in plain sight within the world of education but holds onto abundant hope for what theological education can be and how it can position itself at the front of a massive cultural shift away from White, Western, colonial, and cultural hegemony. This must happen through the formation of what Jennings calls "erotic souls" within ourselves - erotic in the sense that denotes the power and energy of authentic connection with God and our fellow human beings. After Whiteness is for anyone who has ever questioned why theological education still matters. It is a call for Christian intellectuals to exchange isolation for intimacy and embrace their place in the crowd - just like the crowd that followed Jesus and experienced his miracles. It is part memoir, part decolonial analysis, and part poetry - a multimodal discourse that deliberately transgresses boundaries, as Jennings hopes theological education will do, too.
©2020 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (P)2020 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company