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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

28 Mar

Super excited about doing a presentation on Islamic political theology tomorrow for class. I’m particularly talking about Islamic theologies of liberation by doing a reading of Farid Esack, Saba Mahmood, and Malcolm X. This assignment has been so much fun. Here’s some books!

@ashoncrawley

I particularly am utilizing @ashoncrawley thoughts on the Blues that I came across in his book and what it means to discern and articulate theologies of love and liberation in a post-9/11 Blues moment—a moment as we are caught between domination, devaluation, and discrimination.

Hamid Dabashi and Saba Mahmood are most helpful in setting the post-9/11 socio-historical/political context of the intersections of religion and democracy. Rahemtulla and Bretherton are incredibly helpful on constructive theological frameworks. Here’s to a great time! 🙌🏾

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

27 Mar

I remember when both white and Black evangelicals told me to distrust and be “careful” of other Black Christians who either left the white space or were always in the Black space. When I finally left, I learned that the distrust was lies built on fear and insecurity not love.

It was sad to witness. They were trying to teach me a very clear lesson: trust whiteness and distrust blackness. It was the distance from and distrust of blackness that made them feel smart, in control, and safe. It was this same distance that fueled their fear and insecurity.

Ironically, Black people in white spaces had the same distrust of blackness as white people. Both believed whiteness was the final authority for faith. Both believed white Christianity was holy and Black faith was harmful. Both were anti-Black. Both exercises unchallenged power.

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

27 Mar

I am reading the gospels this morning. I read in Mark's gospel where Jesus healed Jairus's daughter and the hemorrhaging woman. Being in society where "men make the rules", Jesus centered their pain and their stories. The patriarchy couldn't see them or heal them, but he could.

The story of Jesus's healings are so much more than beautiful stories of personal transformation. They are also stories of the ways in which Jesus "troubled", as theorist Judith Butler writes, the societal waters, expanding our views of who matters and who doesn't.

When one reads the stories of scripture, it is easy to simply look at them as locked in the past. But we must also look at our present. These stories are meant to help us look around us and ask, "who is left out? who needs to be made well?" That is where the power is: today.

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

26 Mar

If our idea of love and unity is dependent upon my silence and my oppression, then our unity is built to protect your power not to make us more equal. And that’s not love, that’s hate.

Love is not code-word for minimal progress and unity is not performative gestures of charity. If love does not embrace my full humanity and unity not committed to my full equality, I don’t want it. It will make the powerful feel good but it will not change the world we live in.

Love means dismantling every harmful ideology, policy, practice, and belief that devalues, de-centers, disrespects, and destroy the humanity, liberation, and peace of another. Unity means protecting another’s humanity, not profiting off of it.

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

26 Mar

The morning was hot. I was alone. It was dark outside. I hadn’t made any coffee yet; I was too tired. I was quite exhausted. My wife and I had just gone through four grueling, and quite terrifying, days of labor and delivery. I had opened my email, as I do most mornings.

“Dear Dante’ Stewart,” it read, “You have been nominated.” I paused. I wanted to be happy, I wanted to feel all the rush of emotion that would hold both the pleasure and the prestige of what it means to be a "nominated" one. I was happy but I also was exhausted, and shook.

I had been exhausted at the remembrance of doctors having to save my wife’s life as she bled in ways I’ve never seen a human bleed. I was exhausted as I read headlines reading, “Gunman kills 8 in Atlanta Massacre”. I wiped my eyes. I feel what could be a tear. I’m exhausted.

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

25 Mar

"Negroes in this country..are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black..and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared."
—James Baldwin

My goodness.

"Baldwin discusses the adverse psychological effects of those white Christian theological systems to both justify slavery and devalue black subjectivities. The rabid antiblackness in such dangerous fabrications was alarming to Baldwin, who unmasked them as distortions."
—C. White

Theology must make visible the world of those on the margins who have been diminished, devalued, and destroyed. To say that humanity is in the image of God, and to say that Black humanity images God, is to state, as M. Shawn Copeland writes, "a disregarded theological truth."

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