Notes of a Native Daughter
Testifying in Theological Education
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Bearing witness to more liberating futures in theological education
In Notes of a Native Daughter, Keri Day testifies to structural inequalities and broken promises of inclusion through the eyes of a black woman who experiences herself as both stranger and friend to prevailing models of theological education. Inviting the reader into her religious world—a world that is African American and, more specifically, Afro-Pentecostal—she not only uncovers the colonial impulses of theological education in the United States but also proposes that the lived religious practices and commitments of progressive Afro-Pentecostal communities can help the theological academy decolonize and reenvision multiple futures.
Deliberately speaking in the testimonial form—rather than the more conventional mode of philosophical argument—Day bears witness to the truth revealed in her and others’ lived experience in a voice that is unapologetically visceral, emotive, demonstrative, and, ultimately, communal. With prophetic insight, she addresses this moment when the fastest-growing group of students and teachers are charismatic and neo-Pentecostal people of color for whom theological education is currently a site of both hope and harm. Calling for repentance, she provides a redemptive narrative for moving forward into a diverse future that can be truly liberating only when it allows itself to be formed by its people and the Spirit moving in them.
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Princeton Theological Seminary professor Day (The Black Church) provides an incisive and hopeful account of theological education's ongoing struggle with systemic racism. Day paints a sobering portrait of a white, male-centric, and heteronormative academy riddled with systemic racism, cultural complacency, and self-righteous reactionism. Day confronts the central paradox of theological education for a Black person—"that although it has provided liberatory contexts for theological thought and praxis, it has simultaneously been a center of profound exclusion"—and introduces readers to the personal and professional ambiguities of academic life as a minority. For Day, early Pentecostal movements (such as the Los Angeles Azusa Street revival of the early 1900s, an ongoing public worship service that captured a "revolutionary intimacy across differences") offer concrete examples of how "to imagine and live into transgressive communities in response to the racist, hetero-patriarchal, and classist status quo." In contrast to the present "economy of fear" dominating faith communities, which exploits vulnerability and precludes "moments of radical intimacy and belonging," Day suggests "economies of desire" that merge "Pentecostal worship with critical, creative theology for marginalized people" and enable the possibility of "intimacy and belonging" through radical vulnerability. Theological educators, administrators, and students will find much to ponder in this trenchant volume.
