The Christian Imagination Quotes

“The concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable, but I am convinced that before we theologians can interpret the depths of the divine action of reconciliation we must first articulate the profound deformities of Christian intimacy and identity in modernity. Until we do, all theological discussions of reconciliation will be exactly what they tend to be: (a) ideological tools for facilitating negotiations of power; or (b) socially exhausted idealist claims masquerading as serious theological accounts. In truth, it is not at all clear that most Christians are ready to imagine reconciliation.”
― Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

“The interior life of white flesh, on the other hand, had to be the slaves’ most central concern. For any slave living in close proximity to white flesh, life itself depended on understanding and immediately discerning every mood, manner, and motion of white people.”
― Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

“If the social order and the processes of commodification are not transformed in relation to the body through salvation, then salvation becomes hyperlocalized to a single relationship: God and the one being saved.64”
― Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

“Ivory and Mary also channeled what Toni Morrison so eloquently called “the hurt of the hurt world,” the knowledge of the deepest struggles and contradictions of black folks living among white folks.2 My mother was one of those black women who carry intimate knowledge of slave voices. As a little girl she lived with her grandmother, a former slave. She also knew from her own experiences the lives of poor folks in the South who picked cotton, got cheated for their backbreaking labor, and worked diligently to stay out of harm’s way with whites. The experience of agricultural labor, life in the dirt, also brought her into a contradictory but very intimate relationship with the land itself.”
― Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

“A Christian doctrine of creation is not dependent on geographic precision; however, it is not wholly independent of geographic accuracy. Belief in creation has to refer to current real-world places or it refers to nothing.”
― Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race