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Emerging Scholars Network Conversations: Autumn 2022

ESN Conversations is going into its third year and has become a place where ESN members have the opportunity to interact with thoughtful Christian scholars about important questions of academic and cultural import. Our YouTube channel now includes over 30 conversations extending back over two years and has enjoyed over 3300 views and a growing (free) subscriber base. Our past conversations are a great resource for personal listening, a video (or just audio if you want) discussion of a book you are interested in, or a resource for group discussions.

We are very pleased to announce our fall lineup of authors who will be joining us in conversation along with registration links where you can sign up to participate in these conversations. For each conversation, a discount will also be offered for the IVP book being featured during the conversation. So here is who we have coming:

September 15, 2022, 12 pm ET: The Religion of American Greatness with Paul D. Miller (publicity graphic above): From America’s beginning, Christians have often merged their religious faith with national identity. But what is Christian nationalism? How is it different from patriotism? Paul D. Miller, a Christian scholar, political theorist, veteran, and former White House staffer, provides a detailed portrait of—and case against—Christian nationalism. IVP link to book description.

Register for this Conversation

Oct 13, 2022, 12:00 pm ET: Dawn, A Proton’s Tale of All That Came to Be with Cees Dekker, Corien Oranje, and Gijsbert van den Brink. Combining its authors’ scientific knowledge, storytelling skills, and insights from theology, Dawn provides a fresh look at the fundamentals of cosmology, evolutionary biology, and the good news of God in one overarching adventure—in the form of a gripping story. As a special treat, all three co-authors of this book will be joining us online from The Netherlands! IVP link to book description.

Register for this conversation

Nov 17, 2022, 01:00 pm ET: The Thrill of Orthodoxy with Trevin Wax. Dorothy L. Sayers once asserted that “the dogma is the drama.” Every generation faces the temptation to wander from orthodoxy—to seek out the jolt that comes with false teaching, and to drift with cultural currents. And so every generation must be awakened again to the thrill of orthodoxy, and experience the astonishment that comes from stumbling afresh upon the electrifying paradoxes at the heart of the Christian faith. IVP link to book description.

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Dec 20, 2022, 01:00 pm ET: The Man Born to Be King with Kathryn Wehr. Speaking of Dorothy L. Sayer…! From December 1941 until October 1942, the BBC broadcast a series of radio dramas written by Dorothy L. Sayers. In a new critical and annotated edition of “The Man Born to Be King,” scholar Kathryn Wehr brings fresh insights to the plays, their background, Sayers’s creative process, and the ongoing significance of the life of Christ today. Listen again, or for the first time, to the story of the man who was born to be—and still is—king. This conversation is co-sponsored with Women Scholars and Professionals. IVP link to book description.

Register for this conversation

So take a look at those calendars, take a moment to sign up and join others in the Network for some good and important conversations!

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Do Christians Care About Social Justice? 500 Years of the Brown Church

Are Christianity and social justice incompatible? Or are they deeply integrated in ways that many Americans have forgotten or ignored?

According to Robert Chao Romero, author of the new book Brown Church, Christians have much to learn from a 500 year history of Latina/o social justice, theology, and identity that even many Latina/os are unfamiliar with.

Screen Shot 2020-06-17 at 3.37.41 PM

Speaking today at the Emerging Scholars Network is Dr. Robert Chao Romero (@ProfeChaoRomero), author of The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity. Robert is an associate professor of Chicano Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA. He has a PhD from UCLA and a JD from UC Berkeley. With a Mexican father from Chihuahua and a Chinese immigrant mother from Hubei in central China, Robert’s dual cultural heritage serves as the basis for his academic work. Romero is also an ordained minister and co-founder of Jesus 4 Revolutionaries and co-chair of the Matthew 25 Movement. I blogged one of Robert’s talks in 2017.

5285The Christian Social Justice Borderlands

Robert opens by telling us about a course called “The Brown Church” that he taught this quarter at UCLA. After the quarter, the student wrote him this note (rough paraphrase below):

“As a Latino growing up as the son of an undocumented pastor in the Midwest, my experience was different from those who surrounded me… My white peers accepted me as a part of their denomination, but I was not accepted because of my skin color, race, and undocumented status. I wanted to believe in what my family and church taught me as true… I would ask myself how I could identify with such people. Even to this day, those people referred to me as ‘wetbacks,’ ‘beaners,’ and ‘spics.'”

Robert says that this student was caught in what he describes as the “Christian social justice borderlands.” Many students of color come to university with a Catholic or Pentecostal background. In classes, they learn how to think about injustice and they hang out in activist circles. Students start to wonder if it’s possible to be a Christian and care about justice. Their activists friends ask, isn’t Christianity just a white man’s colonizing religion? Then in churches, people tell them that their passions for justice are just leftist/secular interests. Robert expects that hundreds of thousands of Latina/o students in the US feel stuck in this borderland.

Religious education in America has a parallel problem. In many seminaries and religion courses, the history of the Brown Church isn’t even mentioned. That leads many Latina/os to wonder if we have a history at all.

Romero wrote Brown Church for Latina/o Christians in these borderlands so we could learn the history of Christian social justice efforts and find a home in that tradition.

Fray_Antonio_Montesino_2

Statue of Antonio Montesino in the Dominican Republic. CC-B-3.0

The Brown Church

What is the Brown Church? Robert calls it a prophetic, ecclesial community of Latinas and Latinos who have contested social justice in Latin America and the United States for the last 500 years. Romero points out actions by Brown Church figures like Antonio de Montesinos predate Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. Robert sees the Brown Church as a category that transcends theological, social, political, and economic dimensions.

What does the word Brown mean? Robert points out that Latina/os come in many colors. He says that the idea of “Brown” is a metaphor, one that describes racial liminality in the U.S., where so much of society has been built around legal binaries of white and black. To illustrate this, Robert tells us about Latino segregation during the era of Jim Crow. Schools, churches, hospitals, pools, and national parks were segregated. In many cases in the early 20th century, Latinos would argue that they shouldn’t be segregated—not because segregation was wrong, instead arguing that Latinos were white. While people would often win in court, they would still go home and experience discrimination anyway. Even today, many Latinos/Latinas have had the option of “slipping into whiteness” if they got enough degrees or money, but most have not..

Latina/o Christian Community Cultural Wealth

In his new book Brown Church, Robert is trying to bridge between conversations in critical race theory with conversations about Christian theology for a public audience. To social scientists, the book describes what Tara J. Yosso describes as community cultural wealth and what Julie Park calls spiritual capital that communities of color possess.

What is that wealth? Robert shares a two examples from Latina/o theology:

Why is it important that Jesus is from Galilee? As Virgilio Elizondo pointed out in Galilean Journey, people from Galilee were bilinguals who were rejected by religious and intellectual elites of Jesus’s time. If Christians want to know what it means to follow Jesus, we should think about centering Christian thought and work with people who are similarly marginalized.

Robert also tells us about the idea of Mission Integral, an idea developed by Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar in the mid-20th century. As evangelical theologians trained in the United States, they struggled to reach people in Latin America who faced urgent questions related to oppression and revolution. They observed that in the US individualist gospel, racist people could continue to be racist and exploiters could continue to exploit. Individualist Christians could condemn violence but be silent on war or police violence. Padilla described Mission Integral as a plane with two wings: “Evangelism and social action are both integral to Christian mission and cannot be artificially divided one from another.” Trying to separate these two things would be similar to asking about the relative importance of the right wing of a plane to the left.

Brown Church includes the following chapters:

  • El Plan Espiritual del Galilee
  • Las Casas, La Virgen de Guadelupe, and the Birth of the Brown Church
  • Multicultural Voices of Colonial Resistance: Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, Guaman Poma, and Sor Juana Innés de la Cruz
  • Padre Antonio José Martinez, the U.S.-Mexico War, and the Birth of “Brown”
  • The Spiritual Praxis of César Chavez
  • Social Justice Theologies of Latin America: Liberation Theology and Misión Integral
  • Liberation Theology in Practice: Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador
  • Recent Social Justice Theologies of U.S. Latina/os: Latina/o Theology, Mujerista Theology, and Latina/o Practical Theology

What White Christians Can Learn from the Brown Church

In the Q&A, someone asks Robert about what wider Christianity can learn from the Brown Church. Robert describes how white Christians can sometimes get stuck de-constructing problems in the history and culture of Christianity after they start to see those problems. Robert hopes that the long history in the Brown Church of thinking about Christianity and social justice will inspire and inform constructive action by the white Christians in the US.

Robert ends by quoting a letter he received from a reader, who said that the book was like a home he had been seeking for a long time—and which had been there all along. That’s his hope for this book.

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Faith Across The Multiverse Book Club Event

Cover of Faith across the Multiverse
Faith across the Multiverse: Parables from Modern Science by Andy Walsh (Hendrickson Publishers, 2018).

Beginning September 30th, join us for a grand conversation on Faith across the Multiverse: Parables from Modern Science with author, Andy Walsh. Yes, that’s the weekly ESN science blogger! Since Andy’s part of our network, I thought I’d ask him a few quick questions:
[Read more…] about Faith Across The Multiverse Book Club Event

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Author Interview: David Russell Mosley

We caught up with ESN blog author David Russell Mosley to learn about the two books he has released in the past year or so. We hope you enjoy hearing about David’s recent publications. You can also browse his ESN posts here.


1. ESN: Would you give a brief description of your novel and your nonfiction book? 

David: Absolutely! I’ll start with the novel:

My novel, On the Edges of Elfland, is about a young man named Alfred Perkins. He grew up in a small English village called Carlisle where his godfather, Mr. Oliver Cyning, used to tell him all manner of fantastic tales. As a boy, Alfred believed Mr. Cyning’s fairy-stories implicitly. When Alfred got older, however, he stopped believing. Later, after going to University, Alfred has moved back home only to discover that all the old stories were true, and that he has an important role in saving not only his village, but all of Elfland.

My nonfiction book is a work of theology. Specifically, it is the published version of my PhD thesis, both entitled, Being Deified: Poetry and Fantasy on the Path to God. In short, the book has two aims. The first is to reinvigorate the Western church’s notion of deification or theosis (and by deification, I mean being so joined to God, through Christ, that, without crossing the Creator-creature distinction, we can call this union deification). The second aim is to argue that human creativity is essential to deification since it is our imitation of and participation in God as Creator. I explore these topics through everyone from Athanasius to J.R.R. Tolkien.

Editor’s note: For those interested in more detail about the idea of theosis or deification, well-known in the Eastern Orthodox church, David offers the following brief summary: 

Deification, or theosis as it is usually called in Eastern Orthodox churches, can perhaps be summarised by a line from Athanasius of Alexandria, a fourth century theologian, ‘God became man that man might become God’ (On the Incarnation, 54). The idea is that humanity was created by God in order to be made God, insofar as this is possible. We of course can never become uncreated, we can never be eternal, always existing, but the Bible tells us that we will become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1.4). So deification is the end for which God has created us, it is part of why the Son became incarnate (the other being our redemption from sin). Therefore deification, being made into God in a non-pantheistic way, is humanity coming to the end for which is created by the grace and power of God.

2. ESN: Do you see some interaction between the territory you’re exploring in the novel and the nonfiction book? 

I most definitely do. In fact, I wrote them simultaneously during the second year of my PhD. In my thesis, I try to argue that human creativity, exemplified––for my purposes––in the genre of poetry and fantasy, is a necessary part of our deification. In my novel I attempt to enact that. I won’t try to say that my novel is, in any way, an extended metaphor for human creativity. What my novel means is likely best left to my interpreters (my readers). Nevertheless, the two are intimately connected, at least for me.

3. ESN: How did your graduate education prepare you to write the novel, or where do you feel like themes explored in your academic work provided the imaginative resources to explore in the novel?

This is an interesting question. I suppose in some ways what graduate school did for me was teach me the discipline of writing. While I’ve been writing for most of my life, grad school and my PhD work really taught me how to write consistently and often, to set goals in my writing.

The themes I explored in my novel share some fairly clear connections with those in my academic work. For instance, while I’ve been reading Lewis and Tolkien since before I can remember, I studied them and new writers (to me) such as Dante, Chesterton, MacDonald and others in late undergrad and grad school. Reading these authors, whether their fiction or, for those who wrote non-fiction, their other works shaped me as an author.

4. ESN: What are some ideas from the nonfiction book that might be applicable to the lives of Christian academics, whether they study theology or not? 

I think one of the chief things a Christian academic can and should take away from my theology book is this: we were made in the Image of a Creator, we ought to, therefore create and enjoy things created by others. Keep in mind, of course, that while my book focuses on fantasy and poetry, these are not the only things humans create. Dr. Alison Milbank, one the examiners for my PhD, once said to me that for David Jones everything from bread baking to cricket is a work of art. And for Jones, all human art is sacramental. Therefore, everything we do from making breakfast to giving birth to playing games has something artistic, creative, and thus sacramental about it. This, I think, should clearly change the way we see and interact with the world around us.

5. ESN: Now that both books have been published for a while, what are some of the responses to them that have really been encouraging to you as an author? 

In a sense, just knowing that people thought my words worth reading, even just once, has encouraged me. It is good to know, at the very least, that I have good ideas, whatever may be said about their implementation. Most people who have read either work have had good things to say about them, which has affirmed in me that writing is something I’m halfway decent at and should keep doing. It’s also just been wonderful to share my creative world with friends, family, and total strangers. I’ve spent so much time there, and it is so wonderful that I get to share it with others.

6. ESN: How do you see the ideas you’re working with in your books enriching your ongoing life as a teacher and scholar? 

The importance of deification helps me remember, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, that every person I meet is a potential god. It helps me to see Christ in the other. Think about it, every stranger, every poor man on the side of the road, is intended to be so united to God that we can call the process deification. If that doesn’t change how you engage with people or students, I don’t know what will.

In my scholarship, I see myself pushed to, at least attempt, to write beautifully. Writing fiction, and writing about the importance of creativity for our lives, has reminded me that even my scholarship, whether new books or conference papers or journal articles, should be written beautifully.

7. ESN: What are some of the differences, for you as a writer, between crafting fiction and nonfiction? 

At first blush the differences might seem obvious. After all, when writing fiction one is doing almost pure invention (or so it seems) and in writing nonfiction, one must first read, study, research, before writing. But even this distinction is often blurred. Being Deified is certainly speculative in places, meaning I’ve had to invent or go beyond what has typically been said on the subject of deification. When I very first began working on the story that would become On the Edges of Elfland (when I was a junior in college), I was reading up on old folk and fairy tales so I could decide how my own Faërie creatures would act and look. And yet they are different genre. Writing Being Deified required more research and more looking to the ancients, whereas Elfland required more invention, more listening and looking at the world around me in order to get my own world just right.

8. ESN: Anything else you’d like to share with fellow emerging scholars? 

I think perhaps the chief thing I’d like to share is the call to write beautifully. After all, as Christians we recognize the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness. I think all our work, should take these three things into account. Yes, sometimes one will come to the fore, but the others ought never to be left behind. So, write beautifully.

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Interview with John Walton

Adam and Eve Walton Interview

ESN Writer Mark Hansard interviews John Walton, author of The Lost World of Adam and Eve. See Mark’s review of the book here. [Read more…] about Interview with John Walton

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