Mai-Anh Le Tran - Reset the Heart: Unlearning Violence, Relearning Hope

RESET THE HEART:
UNLEARNING VIOLENCE, RELEARNING HOPE

Copyright 2017 by Abingdon Press

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ISBN: 978-1-5018-3246-8

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations are from the Common English Bible. Copyright 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.CommonEnglishBible.com.

Content in can be found in Mai-Anh Le Tran, Communicability, Redeemability, Educability, in Educating for Redemptive Community: Essays in Honor of Jack Seymour and Margaret Ann Crain, ed. Denise Janssen (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 95-110. Used by permission.

This book is derived, in part, from an article published in Religious Education on August 14, 2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00344087.2015.1063960 Reprinted by permission of the Religious Education Association, (http://www.religiouseducation.net).

The list on .

The list on is from Charles R. Foster, Educating Congregations: The Future of Christian Education. Copyright 1994 by Abingdon Press. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To Amanda Phuong-Anh,
upon you we have set our hearts

When you eat a piece of fruit, remember who planted the tree. Thus said wise Vietnamese elders. I, chewing a piece of sugarcane (Rumi), am grateful for the many planters of trees who made every morsel of this fruit a precious bite.

For the ways they demonstrate how scholarship should matter to the way we live, I give thanks for the students, the fourteen alums who contributed to this project, the faculty, and the leadership of Eden Theological Seminary. For the time they took to motivate, challenge, exhort, I owe special gratitude to Margaret Ann Crain, Jack Seymour, Chuck Foster, Evelyn Parker, Dori Baker, Marion Grau. For the inspirational engagement and support that made possible the 2014 conference on Religion, Education, and the (Un)Making of Violencethe research playground for this bookI am grateful to colleagues and board members of the Religious Education Association. For the paradigmatic question, So are you going to do something? and her even-keeled friendship, I thank Martha Robertson. For the number of times she corrected my writing in pencil and told me what she truly thinks of my work, I take sanctuary in the benedictions of Marilyn Stavenger. For her cheerleading, embracing, forgiving, and believing, which make me blush, I owe Andrea Bieler serious royalty. For marvelous stewardship of others words and thoughts, I sing the praises of Ulrike Guthrie and the editorial team of Abingdon. For his diligence and inquisitiveness, I thank my task-manager Jacob. For the way he listened cautiously and knew what to draw out of me, there would be no this or that without David Teel.

And my greatest gifts: HAT, for being an accompanying gossip about theological varia; TAT, for humoring what I do for a living; my personal chef and reluctant gardener, Mom and Dadtheir faith, love, hope, and courage allow me to live, move, and have being.

So are you going to do something?

It was August 13, 2014, and I had just gotten back to St. Louis from New York City, and there I stood in a hair salon catching up with Martha, a colleague and friend, for a few minutes between her appointment and mine. I had no idea what her question meant.

You know, theres talk of activities being organized around what happened over the weekend. Are you going to participate? my friend continued with patience, as if she knew too well what it takes to recalibrate ones frame of mind after sabbatical exploits.

You know, the shooting in Ferguson... , Martha helped out.

It was breaking news, and I had not yet caught on to the names Michael Brown and Darren Wilson. Martha clued me in: a White police officer fatally shot an unarmed Black teenager in a suburb less than fifteen miles north of where I live and teach.oblivious to the news is egregious only in hindsight. After all, doesnt our social imaginary consider violent shootings involving Black youth normal, especially for an urban metropolis like St. Louis?

Three days later, I found myself on the sidewalk of Canfield Drive, staring at a makeshift roadside memorial in the middle of the street, at the spot where a teenagers body was left lifeless and exposed for over four hours before grief-stricken, bewildered, indifferent, vulturous eyes. People were just beginning to gather for what was to be the first vigil for the fatal shooting by local law enforcement of yet another African American youthbut something was different in the air that day. Vigil keepers positioned themselves quietly. A woman evangelist with a bullhorn was proclaiming muffled words about salvation. It began to rain. Someone nearby muttered, Rain cleanses...

August 9 means different things to different peopleand perhaps nothing at all to somebut it disrupted my world. I was in New York City when Eric Garner died under the chokehold of a police officer, and I had just left the San Francisco Bay Area when Oscar Grant was shot by a BART officer who mistook his own gun for a Taser. So why does the body of Michael Brown lifeless on the ground disrupt and disturb me so? Why did the moment at which I nervously sat on the public mourning bench become for me the ominous zero-hundred-hours that marked both an ending and a beginning of somethingof what I knew not at that moment?

For one, it disrupted my professional world because as soon as news broke out, members of the seminary community at which I teach as well as religious professionals and faith groups in all of greater St. Louis knew that we were going to have to snap to attention and spring into action. As facts remained muddied with stories and counter-testimonies, feet took to the streets; vigils and forums were improvised everywhere; teach-ins, preach-ins, and eat-ins were organized by local leaders, in concert with experts and partners from all over the country. In the following months, what seemed to be dramaturgical performances of religious ritual (from ecumenical Christian worship to interfaith prayer services), faith-based action, and intentional consciousness-raising efforts gave evidence of a social can we walk the faith talk at such a violent time as this?