410
Book Reviews
Mai-Anh Le Tran,Reset the Heart: Unlearning Violence, Relearning Hope(Nashville,
Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2017). 176 pp. $35.99 paperback.
The Rev. Dr. Mai-Anh Le Tran’s life changed on August 9, 2014 when her home- town of St. Louis was rocked by the murder of Mike Brown, an unarmed young black man shot in the back by a white police officer named DarrenWilson. Hav- ing been out of town at the time of the shooting, the St. Louis thatTran returned to was different from the one she had left—new movements were forming and new pastoral strategies were needed to address the fault lines revealing them- selves throughout the city. As a United Methodist minister and as a scholar of pedagogy, Tran saw both a great need and a great opportunity for churches (specifically mainline protestant churches) in St. Louis to reconsider how they interacted with their city, taught their congregants about justice, and witnessed to the gospel. Reset the Heartserves as one of her contributions to the ongoing pursuit of peace in her city.
The book is structured around three “paradigmatic questions”: “1. What does it mean to educate for faith in a world marked by violence? 2. How are Chris- tian faith communities complicit in the teaching and learning of violence? 3. What new (or renewed) practices of faith and educational leadership can help us unlearn violence and relearn hope?” (10). More than physical harm, violence, for Tran, is “a distortion of the sacred vitality and intimacies of bodies, of com- munities, of social structures, and of earthly habitats” (24) which can be, and has been,taught in churches and wider society alike (22).
The presence of violence in the world is a challenge for faith in more ways than one. Whereas many Christians perhaps think only about questions of theodicy, in which violence is a deconstructive challenge to faith that bleeds meaning from the world, Tran focuses on the constructive challenge of vio- lence, which leads to what she calls ecstasy (7). If faith is the “primal capacity to inhabit our world, and to imbue our muddling through it with some sense of meaning and purpose” (9), then ecstasy is the public expression of faith, the practice of “resacralizing”/“reenchanting” a violent world with the mean- ing and purpose found in faith. In this way, “violence challenges our Christian communities to regenerate radical forms of prophetic, (pro)tested faith” (10).
Having made her foundational claims, Tran spends the remainder of the book discussing how and why churches have failed to live up to their ecstatic potential (chapters 2 and 3) and offering practical advice for how to get congre- gations back on the right path (chapters 4–6). Given some of the dire predic- tions facing mainline denominations in the United States, Tran asks an incisive question: “What if many Christian churches are not just dying institutions but also toxic communities that actively emit symptoms of violence …?” (49). She
PNEUMA
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15700747-04003013
1
Book Reviews
411
proceeds to illustrate ways in which churches have become agents of what the theorist Henry Giroux calls “disimagination,” a trenchant social phenomenon that short-circuits “the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue” (28).
The final section of Reset the Heart details how the process of addressing these flaws and “unlearning violence” must be defined by three characteris- tics—“communicable love, redeemable faith, and educable hope” (75)—all of which were powerfully present during the clergy-led Moral Monday protest that took place in St. Louis on October 13, 2014. In a world that often sees the bodies of strangers as threatening or “contagious,” Moral Monday protesters happily joined in a chaotic crush of bodies on the streets and then shared a meal afterward, “catching” and transmitting love and forming embodied bonds. This love was born out of redeemable faith, the conviction that the promises of the gospel can be experienced today, and that Christians can “make good on those promises” by taking to the streets and praying with their feet (103). This public witness of communicable love forged by redeemable faith makes possible an educable hope, a catalyzing re-enchantment of the world that causes “fractal mirroring” or “mimesis” of the “resurrectionalandinsurrectional” ecstasy to occur in other contexts as the witness of the protesters teaches peo- ple what hope looks like and empowers them to “go and do likewise” (143). Tran concludes her book with practical case studies of how this three-fold approach played out in fourteen different congregations in St. Louis, and provides a help- ful group-discussion-oriented appendix that summarizes her arguments and poses some generative questions.
There is much to commend about Reset the Heart. Tran manages to pack in a surprising amount of stories and information into 168 pages, and she mod- els how to meaningfully reckon with the violence of the world, including the violence caused by Christian education, without letting it lead to despair or hand-wringing inaction (74–75). She handles the fraught discourse of intersec- tional justice with the ease of someone who has not only read widely, but who has also spent significant time doing justice work alongside a diverse array of people. Her intersectional competency extends to her use of sources, too, and she weaves together sociology, philosophy, theology, critical race theory, peda- gogical theory, and psychology in a way that feels natural without blurring the particularities of each unique theorist.
At the same time, Tran’s willingness to preserve the academic jargon of her interlocutors and to develop her own raises some questions about the appropri- ate audience for the book. Tran does an admirable job of explaining her terms, but even fairly well-read Methodist pastors might have some difficulty figur- ing out how to incorporate the “fractal mirroring of mimetic ecstasy” into their
PNEUMA 40 (2018) 389–452
2
412
Book Reviews
ministry. And although she is writing about social justice within a mostly white liberal tradition, Tran tends toward an unnecessarily immanent reduction of theology and the Spirit. Prayer becomes primarily about sustaining human hope in the midst of activism (122), faith is defined by the “ultimate concern [for] the essential aliveness of self and neighbor” (156), and true religion in the “age of the Spirit” does “not offer dogma” but rather “narratives that help people make meaning and intensify human experiences, and ethical guides for daily living” (163). While such matters are essential and inextricable parts of prayer, faith, and religion, Reset the Heart at times gets close to circumscribing Chris- tianity within phenomenology and theology within religious studies.
These factors in no way diminish the importance of Tran’s work, but they likely inhibit the book’s reach and influence within American churches. This is unfortunate, because pastors and Christian practitioners need Reset the Heart, and many more books like it, to help learn what dynamic, ethical Christian teaching and practice might look like. But more than this, they need to simply show up to protests and community justice initiatives and become one with those beautiful bodies that have become “implements of sacramental teach- ing” (16) and begin re-setting their hearts toward the in-breaking reign of God (163).
Matthew Jones
Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California [email protected]
PNEUMA 40 (2018) 389–452
3
Leave a Reply