The Need to Listen / Miroslav Volf

"Before speaking about victims and to victims I need to listen. We all who are not victims need to listen." In a follow-up to his May 30 response to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, Miroslav Volf speaks frankly about the necessity of listening to black perspectives about racism, police brutality, and the history and continuous experience of black suffering.

faith.yale.edu

Show Notes

• Police brutality and the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd
• Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity
• Exclusion’s specific expression in racism in this country
• The book is from the perspective of the victims
• Embarking on the difficult journey of embrace
• Even when every fiber of their bodies and all the steerings of their souls want to counter violence with violence and exclusion with exclusion”
• Miroslav’s home town in Croatia was under siege:
• “I wrote the entire book primarily for myself. It's many pages are one lengthy attempt to discern what the integrity of the Christian response looks like when a third of your country gets occupied and thousands of its inhabitants get ethnically cleansed”
• Anger and doing what needs to be done
• “What I still believe needed to be done was to make a costly journey into what Martin Luther King called the beloved community”
• The European colonial project and the inheritance of whiteness
• “My whiteness is my privilege”
• “Before speaking about victims, I need to listen…We all who are not victims need to listen”
• “If I think that I already understand the other and their behavior, I have intellectually closed myself to them”
• Betrayal and solidarity
• Violent protests spreading across the country in response to the death of George Floyd
• “We also failed to speak the name of Briana Taylor. A black woman who was killed by police in her Louisville, Kentucky home in March. These realities require faithful and courageous Christian response much needed exercise in public theology”
• Willie Jennings, a professor at Yale and a leading theological voice in this country, will return to the podcast to offer his own commentary on our situation
• He will be joined by Carrie Day, a professor of constructive theology and African-American religion at Princeton Theological Seminary
• “I invite you to take time, to listen and open yourself up for what they have to say”