Tag: race and the Enlightenment

The Double-Minded Church: Spiritual Formation and the Impractical Theology of Race

.Reading time 6 minutes.

This week, I was in Decatur, Georgia and presented at ChurchWorks, a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship conference for ministers of spiritual formation and education.  I, along with several others, spoke about the theological rumblings and ruminations of our shared ministry with Christ.  I will present part one of the message here: “Jesus loves the little children/ […]

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Who came first- people or race?

.Reading time 1 minute.

Unlike the chicken or the egg analogy, human beings and the social construct of race are not inseparable.  Humans did not come from race but race did come from humans, a product of Enlightenment thinking.  Race was not “in the beginning” with God but is with us now because we created it.  We came first […]

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Five facts about the life of race

.Reading time 3 minutes.

Race is a modern invention of the European Enlightenment: “European Enlightenment thinkers retained the Greek ideal of reason, as well as this reason’s categorical function of discriminating between the cultured (now called the ‘civilized) and the ‘barbarian’ (the ‘savage’ or the ‘primitive’). It can be argued, in fact, that the Enlightenment’s declaration of itself as […]

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