Abstract
In Reset the Heart, Mai-Anh Le Tran explores the afterburn of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent weeks and months of bodily testimony, public solidarity, and resistance offered there as an opening to explore faith formation that might undo racism and violence. She asks the provocative and timely question of why so many faith communities were rendered “incapable and unwilling to respond with some form of faith-driven action” (3) in face of the injustice made plain in that situation, and how transformative education might allow for conversion from inaction and tacit support of deep structural injustice to hopeful resistance grounded in faith.
Tran’s concern is not only that the church may be held “culturally captive,” as religious educator Charles Foster argued over two decades ago, but also that it is pedagogically complicit in the maintenance of violence through its erasure of historical memory, its colonizing use of the Bible as a weapon, its banking curricula, and its maintenance of a habitus of dis-imagination. Tran’s wide-ranging analysis shows her deft hand with critical race theory, religious and critical educational philosophy, and decolonizing theologies, an integrating skill well known to those of us who have experienced her recent leadership of the Religious Education Association. Her unflinching, yet ultimately hopeful, look at the ways in which Christian religious education often participates in rather than counteracts racism and violence, defined here as “a distortion of the sacred vitality and intimacies of bodies, of communities, of social structures, and of earthly habitats” (24), opens deep questions about the very possibility of religious educational efforts to unlearn violence.
In the second half of the book, Tran offers new metaphors for thinking about religious education, all intentionally emphasizing the development of “ability”: communicability, redeemability, and educability. Her focus is on practices that enliven the agency of faithful people in responding to violence with tangible expressions that embody the Gospel. This exploration is illustrated in the experiences and reflections of fourteen local congregational ministers, who provide anecdotes and narratives to help ground these new metaphors in congregational practice and wisdom. Communicability reflects contagious love through (in)decent contact, sharing a boundless table, and celebrating carnal liturgy. Redeemability represents the faith that a broken world can be repaired, through resurrectional consciousness, insurrectional witness, and making good on failed promises. Finally, educability signifies a kind of radical learning that critiques hegemony through being grounded in local struggles while reforming the habitus through mimetic ecstasy, “the capacity for persons in nurturing communities to look at each other and model themselves after the freeing actions that awaken all to the vitality and sacredness of their life together” (143).
While these innovative categories for imagining education can be difficult to get one’s head around on a first read, I believe that Tran’s search for new metaphors and her decentered ways of talking about education are necessary to capture the radical reimagination of faith formation for which she is advocating. The book models both the willingness to ask painful questions necessary to expose the deep interweaving of Christian belief with racism and violence, while remaining grounded in the hope for movement out of existing structures and into a new basileia future less intertwined with these realities. In doing so, she models the moral courage and bodily witness she deems necessary for educational ministry sufficient for responding to intractable structural injustice.