Thandeka (minister)

Thandeka [1][2] is a Unitarian Universalist minister, an American liberal theologian,[3] and the creator of a contemporary affect theology.

Rev. Dr. Thandeka
Born
Sue Booker

March 25, 1946
New Jersey
EducationClaremont Graduate University (Ph.D.)

UCLA (M.A.)

Columbia University, School of Journalism (M.A.)

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (B.A.)
Occupation(s)Theologian and activist
Known forContemporary affect theory, critical vision theory, theology, philosophy
Websitehttps://revthandeka.org/

Thandeka's affect theology grounds religious knowing in human feeling,[4] combining concepts from nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher with insights from affective neuroscience.[5] Thandeka is the founder and CEO of Love Beyond Belief, a non-profit organization.

Biography

Thandeka was born Sue Booker to Emma (Barbour) Booker, an artist and teacher, and Merrel D. Booker, a Baptist minister and seminary professor who had studied with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Theological School in New York City.[2] She was drawn to the Unitarian church in the 1960s,[3] and was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister in 2001.[2] She received her name from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984; it means "beloved" or "one who is loved by God" in Xhosa.[3][6]

She studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and went on to earn an M.A. in history of religions at UCLA.[2] She earned a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in 1988, where she studied with John Cobb and Jack C. Verheyden.[3]

Career

Thandeka is a former television producer and an Emmy award winner.[7] She has taught at San Francisco State University, Williams College, Meadville Lombard Theological School, Harvard Divinity School, Lancaster Seminary, and Brandeis University.[2]

Theology

Thandeka's theological work considers the role of feeling or emotion in human religious and spiritual experiences. Her book The Embodied Self is based on a close reading of Schleiermacher's Dialektik, focusing on his idea that feeling is primary in human experience, and exploring how feeling enables people to connect mind and body,[3] or thinking and organic being.[8] Her work considers the religious significance of neuroscientific understandings of emotions,[3] such as those of Jaak Panksepp.[9] Thandeka's affect theology centers affective consciousness, as opposed to belief, in religious experience.[10]

White racial identity

Thandeka also critiques some popular approaches to anti-racism work, and takes a different approach to understanding white racial identity. She considers the concepts of racism and white privilege to be terms needing further exploration.[11] She affirms explorations begun by James Baldwin, using insights from neuroscience and complex post-traumatic stress disorders. Thandeka analyzes the psychology of white identities were constructed in America to hide a profound sense of betrayal by one's own white kith and kin, white community, and white government.[12] This sense of betrayal injures persons' ability to be "relational beings."[13] While Thandeka is hopeful that her insights into this will help white Americans discover their common ground with other groups who are suffering so that mutual advance are made, others disagree.[14][11] In 1999, Thandeka criticized the anti-racism program adopted by the Unitarian Universalist Association for its reliance on ideas of original sin and human helplessness, which are rejected by Unitarian Universalism.[15] Her program for congregational spiritual revitalization includes efforts to address racial and economic injustice through the love, care, and compassion of small group ministries networking together to heal themselves and the world.[16]

Love Beyond Belief

The application of Thandeka's contemporary affect theology is operational in her non-profit organization, Love Beyond Belief. It organizes small group "Universal Connections" workshops, consultations, and programs for religious and spiritual organizations.

Publications

Thandeka's book The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Solution to Kant's Problem of the Empirical Self (1995), undertakes a major re-reading of the philosophical analysis of F. D. E. Schleiermacher's theological claims, namely, his Dialektik.[8]

In Learning to be White: Money, Race, and God in America (1999), Thandeka reaffirms W.E.B. DuBois's view that American slavery was first and foremost a labor issue. She also affirms the work of social critic W. J. Cash who calls the results of the white exploitation a white pathology in his 1941 book The Mind of the South.

Her essays have appeared in The Oxford University Handbook on Feminist Theology and Globalization (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher (2005).[6]

In Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness (2018), Thandeka tracks how Christian theology lost its original emotional foundation of love through a linguistic error created by the first-century Apostle Paul when he introduced a new word "conscience" [Greek, 'syneidesis'] to discourse on Christ. This discourse became the New Testament emotional foundation for handling gentile pain and suffering that generated almost 2000 years of anti-Jewish and anti-Judaic Christian sentiment and activity, (2) Paul's error was initially justified, explained and compounded by Augustine and then Martin Luther, (3) Schleiermacher tried but failed to correct the error by reaffirming love as the affective foundation of Christian faith, (4) the nineteenth-century American enlightenment of Common Sense moral values reaffirmed the false foundation for Christian faith of pain and suffering accidentally created by Paul, and (4) liberal Protestants abandoned the errant emotional foundation without retrieving the original emotional foundation for Gentile faithfulness to Christ that Paul tried to establish, (5) the critique of the compromised legacy of Protestantism by Reinhold Niebuhr and John B. Cobb Jr., (6) and the successful reaffirmation by Thandeka of the original Pauline foundation of love for faithfulness to Christ.

Personal life

Thandeka's partner is Naomi King, the daughter of novelist Stephen King.[17]

References
  1. James, Jacqui, ed. (1998). Between the Lines: Sources for Singing the Living Tradition (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Skinner House Books. p. 131. ISBN 9781558963313.
  2. Harris, Mark W. (2018). Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism (2nd. ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 537–538. ISBN 9781538115909.
  3. Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950-2005. John Knox Press, 2006.
  4. "Thandeka", Harvard Square Library. Retrieved 2020.01.01.
  5. "Contemporary Affect Theology". RevThandeka.org. Retrieved 2020.01.01
  6. "Thandeka". Westar Institute. Retrieved 2020.01.01
  7. "Thandeka". Unitarian Universalist Association. Retrieved 2020.01.01
  8. Lamm, Julia A. Book review. The Journal of Religion Vol. 77, No. 3 (Jul., 1997), pp. 482-483
  9. Vial, Theodore (December 30, 2019). "Love Beyond Belief: Review". Reading Religion. Retrieved April 16, 2020.
  10. McDaniel, Jay. "On Music and Being Alive". Open Horizons. Retrieved April 16, 2020.
  11. V. Denise James. "Playing the Race Game: A Response to Thandeka's "Whites: Made in America"". The Pluralist. Vol. 13, No. 1, SAAP 2017 Conference Proceedings (Spring 2018), pp. 51. Retrieved 2020.01.05
  12. Stecopoulos, Harry (April 1, 2002). "Book Reviews (Learning to be White and Producing American Races)". The Mississippi Quarterly. 55 (2): 271–76. JSTOR 26476593.
  13. Sturm, Douglas. Book review. The Journal of Religion Vol. 80, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 371-372
  14. Pappas, Gregory Fernando. "What Is Going On? Where Do We Go from Here? Should the Souls of White Folks Be Saved?". The Pluralist Vol. 13, No. 1, SAAP 2017 Conference Proceedings (Spring 2018), pp. 67. Retrieved 2020.01.05
  15. Thandeka (Fall 1999). "Why Anti-Racism will Fail" (PDF). Journal of Liberal Religion. 1 (1).
  16. "Love Beyond Belief". Rev. Thandeka. Retrieved April 16, 2020.
  17. "River of Grass Ministry". Archived from the original on May 2, 2010. Retrieved April 5, 2009.
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