From “The White Savior as Diseased Creation”

Chapter 6
Jacquelynn Price-Linnartz

Our social imagination is riddled with disease. Social imagination here means “worldview” but with a deliberate consideration of practices and social arrangements. This imagination is social in two senses: it is shared within a broad community, and it articulates how we fit together. We collectively imagine how we all fit together and thereby make it so. It overlaps with culture and society but reduces it to neither. As with worldview and culture, we can be more and less aware of its components and operations—when something is embedded in our social imagination, it is in the air we breathe.

Our social imagination is infected with the disease of whiteness—a specific perversion of Christian thought and practice that exalts a false ideal of humanity, idolatrously placing the White Man ideal in the place that Christians otherwise reserve for Jesus Christ.

Movies—including their posters and narratives—are a part of how we form, transmit, and modify our social identity by way of our shared social space. In them, we see the ordered landscape of whiteness—the dominance of centered, white male protagonists around and beneath whom lesser characters take their respective places, showing how, as film scholars Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon put it, “the world revolves around the white messiah.”

From Conversations

Chapter 17
Awet I. Andemicael, Musician

One of the things I enjoy most about being a musician is the interplay with fellow performers and audience members in the common space that we create together. I marvel at how we, as diverse individuals, can be drawn into this vivid communal reality that comes into being among us, enriched and enlivened by it without being subsumed in it. Of course, it is more challenging to achieve this in the virtual spaces that performers have had to navigate during the pandemic. But I am amazed by, and grateful for, the extent to which we are still able to experience some measure of community around music and other arts, and in prayer and worship, even when we are physically distanced.

Another related aspect of being a musician that I find especially fulfilling is the priestly dimension of concert performance—being involved in God’s work of rendering Godself present in the assembly, especially in unexpected places like concert halls. When I stand on a (literal or metaphorical) stage to sing, I often have the sense of a cosmic reality linked to our mundane musicking. It is the presence of the living God among us, and the revelation of our role as translucent mediators of that presence to the audience and fellow performers. In and with and through my singing body, and the listening and singing and playing bodies around me, God’s presence dwells, God’s spirit unites, God’s glory radiates.