Chapter 5. Intimacy

Living Inside the White House (p. 241)

l  To be slave in America was to be subject to white flesh.

l  Slaveholding society put the horrific patters of cultural intimacy in place.

l  The structuring reality associated with white bodies is a fundamental aspect of the architecture of distorted cultural intimacy in the modern West. – Through the print media and the electronic visual media, white bodies are presented as the bearers and interpreters of humanity, and they also function as the archetype of humanity.

–         Jennings explains the metaphor of architecture of white intimacy

–         The imaginations of multiple postcolonial peoples have been displaced from the earth, their specific land, and join through electronic media to realities of mobility and migration endemic to current material life under capitalism.

l  This architecture of distorted cultural intimacy may be difficult to be discerned because it is disseminated over vast distance and intricately woven into electronic media.

l  Jennings argues that the question facing the modern world is whether there is a form of cultural joining and interaction that does not depend on or set in place desperate and destructive xenophobic responses to these overwhelming forces.

 

Seeing Mangled Space (p.247)

l  If Christianity is going to untangle itself from these mangled spaces, what do we have to do?

–         We have to recognize a more grounded vision of a doctrine of creation: It is first a doctrine of place and people, of divine love and divine touch, of human presence and embrace, and of divine and human interaction.

–         Christianity is in need of place to be fully Christian.

–         The land is a site of transformation through relationship. And the colonialist moment was about the right transformation and relationship, yet both were marked by death.

l  Jennings stresses that the right transformation is Christian faith receiving its identities through interaction with the social logics of language, landscape, and peoples. Also, the right relationships invite new patters of life through the ongoing interpretation and struggle because they constitute a new people in the body of Jesus – their joining to Israel, and the power of the joining on the social imaginary of Christian life.

l  Jennings argues that we have to stand on nothing greater than the body of one person for Christian communities to move beyond our present cultural fragmentation and segregated mentalities.