REA2018

Challenging White Jesus: Addressing Effects of Race in the Undergraduate Bible Classroom
Amanda Pittman (Abilene Christian University)
John H. Boyles

Research Interest Group. [Paper] This paper examines both the presence of and the potential opposition to white normativity in a Christian liberal arts university. Research on a cohort of first year undergraduate students demonstrates the durability of race as a factor in both students’ grades in required Bible courses and their self-reported spiritual perspectives and experiences. In conversation with relevant literature, we offer some interpretations of these findings as well as some strategic pedagogical interventions aimed at more active resistance to the prevailing winds of white normativity.


Catholic Social Learning and Racial Injustice: See — Judge... Act?
Mara Brecht (University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto)

Research Interest Group. [Paper] The white racial landscape of Catholic higher education makes destabilizing white normativity tricky. Whiteness must be engaged while also being undone. Catholic educators have significant resources at their disposal: Theo-ethical frameworks, built on Catholic Social Teaching, to address racial injustice, and the wisdom of multicultural educators on the wiley function of whiteness in learning environments. To deepen student analysis of white experience as a theological issue, I argue for the necessity of integrating theological anthropology and phenomenology into this educative mix.


Addressing White Supremacy on Campus: Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Theological Education
Steffano Montano (Boston College)

Research Interest Group. [Paper] Students in colleges and universities across the United States are being exposed to overtly White supremacist groups on campus. These groups dub themselves ‘identitarians’ and attempt to influence students to support a White nationalist ideology that threatens the lives of people of color. Theologically, this ideology also presents an obstacle for instruction: the existence of a competing Imago Dei that ties itself to White supremacy, dehumanizing persons of color. This paper encourages the use of anti-racist pedagogies in theological education as a corrective to this competing Imago Dei.