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Thank you, thank you. It is indeed my pleasure to introduce our Westerfeld lecturer, Dr. Marcia Riggs, who is the J. Erskine Love Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the THM Program at Columbia Theological Seminary.

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Dr. Riggs has published numerous articles and books. She hails from, has a PhD that is from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Divinity from Yale. University Divinity School, and a bachelor's in religion from Randolph-Macon Women's College, Lynchburg, Virginia.

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A couple of disclaimers. First of all, I am delighted to introduce her, but we are not related. So let's just get that out because someone later will come to me and say, oh, how long have you known her? Good that your friend is here.

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Well, she is now my friend. She is my sister in Christ, and I am delighted to be able to stand here. Before she comes to the podium, I did want to get a little more information about this wonderful woman. She has a dossier that is numerous, and it is wonderful.

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But I wanted to get the inside scoop Dr. Riggs, and so I contacted a former student of hers and a current colleague, and I want to read what they said about Dr. Riggs.

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The former student, a friend of mine, said, Dr. Riggs is an engaging and innovative teacher who doesn't simply teach theoretical knowledge, but who creatively facilitates the learning process with her students, the church, and wider community. She envisions the gray areas of life, the places of conflict, as the best teachers for the spiritual, social, ethical, and overall human experience. This former student goes on to say, I felt that she provided me with relevant tools for engaging the ministry to which God has called me.

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Even after graduating, I regularly seek her wisdom and refer back to her course material as I continually seek a way forward for myself and those God has called me to partner with. From a current colleague and staff member at Columbia, I would describe Professor Marcia Riggs as being among the most respected and insightful professors at Columbia Theological Seminary. Her classes are in demand by students at both the master's and doctoral level.

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She has proven herself time and time again to be a good friend and an invaluable colleague in ministry. Friends of Austin Seminary, I would like to introduce to some and present to others the Reverend Dr. Marcia Riggs. Thank you for that introduction.

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Now I have two reasons to worry about this presentation. The previous presenter, as you will see, They did a good job of getting very different styles of presenters. But come with me on this journey.

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My passion as an educator and minister these days is to awaken and nurture moral imagination. I think that the awakening and nurture of moral imagination is a critical task for ministerial leadership lay and ordained in the 21st century. And I think it's a critical task because many in the churches are focused on saving the churches by returning to Scripture and tradition. They feel we've lost our way.

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But in turning or returning to Scripture and tradition, it seems that they're forgetting. that such a turn or returning cannot be disconnected from the ways that Scripture and tradition in the past have been the catalyst for violence, and that violence has meant conquest or even alienation of peoples who either did not accept the gospel or who interpreted the gospel in ways that sustained struggles to overcome oppression. that were very in tune with these words, scattering the proud and the imagination of their hearts, bringing down rulers, filling the hungry, sending the rich away empty. So this is a critical task, this awakening, this nurturing of moral imagination, because there are also others who are leaving the churches,

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because of this turning or returning to Scripture and tradition. Because the turning, the returning means exclusion. Exclusion from ordination, exclusion from the table, exclusion from ecclesial community, thus exclusion from the church's moral community that should be grounded God's justice.

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This is a critical task, this nurturing of moral imagination, because Christianity is one among many religions, and we can claim and proclaim our particular distinctive beliefs, but these beliefs do not make us morally superior to those whose beliefs differ from ours. So finally, the awakening of moral imagination is critical because the faith journey of the 21st century church as people of God must be a quest to open ourselves anew to who God is, what God requires of us, and where God is doing God's new thing in both the church and the world. Now, importantly, moral imagination, like all ethical reflection and theological reflection, requires that we know and affirm who we are, with whom we are in solidarity, that we make known our religious and historical grounding. So I'm actually beginning this lecture with a brief sketch of my socio-religious location.

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I am a womanist Christian liberation ethicist. And this means I have a particular self-identity. I have a particular understanding of my vocation. My self-identity is in part reflected in terms set forth by Alice Walker in her definition of a womanist in

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in Search of Our Mother's Gardens, where she says, a womanist is a black feminist whose character traits are inclusive of those adjectives that are found in her definition, outrageous, audacious, courageous, willful, responsible, in charge, serious. As a womanist, I join some other black women religious scholars who are acknowledging the multi-dimensions of African-American women's lived experience as source for theology, for ethical reflection. We acknowledge that it is a woman-centered, woman-identified, personal, communal, historical, artistic, political, and religious political tradition that lives within the complex interactions of race, gender, class, oppression.

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So as a womanist Christian liberation ethicist, I'm drawing from a tradition of African-American women, a religious ethical tradition. And that tradition has several pieces to it. And it is one that can be found in familiar voices, as well as unfamiliar ones to some of you.

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It's a tradition that says that religious belief and vocation and social activism are always interrelated. It says that a belief in the justice of God and justice for African-Americans, for all of humanity, is a command of God. It claims that Jesus' commandment to love our neighbor is a socio-political mandate to reform society in the context of God's providence.

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It is a tradition that says a call, that there is a call for communal authenticity and integrity in the quest for socio-political and economic liberation. When I'm claiming this religious ethical tradition, I hear Sojourner Truth saying, The Lord has made me a sign unto this nation, and I go round to testifying and showing their sins again my people. I tell them about Jesus, and I tell them about the sins of this people.

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And I hear Maria Stewart when she says, I am a strong advocate for the cause of God and for the cause of freedom. Had the ministers of the gospel shunned the very appearance of evil, had they faithfully discharged their duty, whether we would have heard them or not, we should have been a very different people from who we are now. But they have kept the truth, as it were, hid from our eyes, and have cried, peace, peace, when there was no peace. They have plastered us with untempered mortar and have been, as it were, blind leaders of the blind.

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I hear those voices from that tradition. And finally, my sense of who I am as a Christian womanist, as a liberation ethicist, is indeed formed In the church tradition. of my birth, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church tradition.

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So I've been nurtured on the stories of a tradition where every child of African Methodism knows of our folks being pulled from their feet in prayer or denied the sacraments. We know the biblical story as a liberation story. We know that the prophets are always calling us back into covenant relationship and justice-making. We know that Jesus, Jesus' work is both spiritual and social.

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So finally, it is my solidarity, the people with whom I am in solidarity, that makes it critical for the work that I do. And that is, I stand in solidarity with African-American women whose lives make my personal story, the story of an African-American woman with a PhD teaching in a predominantly rich white southern seminary who enjoys relative economic security, it makes this group of African-American women who make my story atypical. Those are the women I stand in solidarity with. They are some 17 million black women in the U.S.

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who have only high school diplomas. They are 46 or 7 percent of black women who head a household and live below the poverty line. They are some 40,000 black women, 69 percent of whom have children under the age of 18. sentenced to more than one year in a state or federal prison for a non-violent offense.

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To be a womanist Christian liberation ethicist is to know that their fate is interconnected with my fate. So in sum, my ministerial vocation is about the work of destabilizing systems, about challenging universal moral norms, because those norms keep some groups in power while rendering other groups totally outside of the moral community and then expendable. So I live as a prophetic presence, that is, someone whose moral being and agency mediates tensions between personal and intercommunal and intercommunal and interspecies struggle.

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in a quest for liberation and justice for God's entire creation. So my aim in these two lectures is for us to do some work of moral imagination. And I want to do that by interrogating the theological, ethical ideal and moral vision of beloved community. I will interrogate this ideal and vision using two lenses.

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One is socio-ethical, the other is socio-cultural. Ultimately, I hope that I create a space wherein your moral imagination is awakened to the quest for a moral vision of beloved community that may guide us toward ways for living into the tensions. of our ever-evolving cross-cultural, intercultural, intracultural, multicultural, multi-confessional, multi-religious realities of the 21st century. So in these two lectures, I'm inviting you essentially to query about orthodoxy.

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To ask about orthodoxy through a dialogical interpretive process that I will expand upon the notions then of canon and tradition. Or at least I want you to ask about how canon and tradition function or are dysfunctional in the 21st century church. So let's look first to the socioethical lens.

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the ideal of beloved community refacted through such a lens. In their book, The Search for a Beloved Community, The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., Kenneth L. Smith and I.R. Zepp Jr.

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referred to the vision of the beloved community as the capstone of King's thought. Although King's vision of beloved community mandated both racial and economic justice in the U.S. context and globally, I'm going to focus here on the theological grounding of that vision and the importance of the grounding of that vision for our ongoing social moral dilemmas of race, class, and gender. The meaning of King's vision of the Blue Love Community was that we would be a transformed.

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and regenerated human society, and that this society would be an integrated society wherein legal desegregation was at work. An integrated society was one wherein, according to King's description of integration in the newsletter of the SCLC, his words, a genuine intergroup and interpersonal living experience. King understood desegregation to be a matter of changing laws, wherein integration was also a matter of changing attitudes and hearts.

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In order for integration to be authentic, King believed that human beings had to recognize their interdependency. We know this from his now frequently quoted words, We are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. So King considered the civil rights movement a kind of microcosm of the envisioned beloved community.

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His words again from that newsletter, the educated and illiterate, the affluent and welfare recipient, white and black, people who had heretofore been separated by rigid social mores and laws were brought together in common cause. The theological grounding of King's vision has been described as threefold. One, the liberal vision of the doctrine of creation, Two, the prophetic appeal for social justice.

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And three, the New Testament concept of agape. So in his address in 1957 entitled The Power of Nonviolence, King calls then the Civil Rights Movement an experiment in love. And he talks about it this way. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive, goodwill for all human beings.

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Biblical theologians would say it is the love of God working in the minds of human beings. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. And when you come to love on this level, you begin to love persons, not because they are likable, not because they do things that attract us, but because God loves them. And here we love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does.

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It is this type of love that stands at the center of the movement that we are trying to carry on in the Southland, agape. This experiment in agape love thus meant that women, men, and children became a force for social and political change that actually disrupted decades of systemic racial violence. These men, women, and children of the movement were surely engaged in what we consider the ministry of reconciliation. They were enacting a deep, abiding response to the love of Christ and Christ's death and resurrection and what that requires of us.

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Or to borrow a Wesleyan theologian's terms, they were acting out responsible grace. So diverse groups of U.S. citizens joined in the Civil Rights Movement because they were inspired by a moral vision of beloved community. They believed in King's dream of one day having his children no longer judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

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So in the socio-moral, sociopolitical context of the late 50s into the 60s, The vision of beloved community was a compelling ethical ideal for the movement. And it worked because, as an interpreter of the movement says, Drawing from the best of liberalism and Christianity, King forged a vision of community that transcended the limitations of each and built upon the accomplishments of both. But I think even more so, the vision of beloved community worked at that time because it was embodied, because it was enacted in a movement.

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Brutalities of the 60s, such as the bombing deaths of four little African-American girls on a Sunday morning, kept the vision grounded in flesh and bone. The beloved community was hoped for and prayed for, but also acted out daily in the midst of struggle. And still, with King's assassination in 1968, there is a retreat from the experiment in love. And at first, some might say this was simply and expectedly the result of the loss of the movement's charismatic leader.

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However, as time has progressed through today, it became and is evident that something more fundamental lies behind the retreat From the vision. of beloved community and the movement it inspired. Black feminist social critic Belle Hooks offers an explanation in her book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism.

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She writes, Some days it is just hard to accept that racism can still be such a powerful dominating force in all our lives. When I remember all that black and white folks together have sacrificed to challenge and change white supremacy, when I remember the individuals who gave their lives to the cause of racial justice, my heart is deeply saddened that we have not fulfilled their shared dream of ending racism, of creating a new culture, a place for the beloved community. Early on in the work for civil rights, long before his consciousness had been deeply radicalized by resistance to militarism and global Western imperialism, Martin Luther King envisioned a beloved community where race could be transcended, forgotten, where no one could see skin color. This dream has not been realized, Hooks says, from its inception,

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It was a flawed vision. The flaw, however, was not the imagining of a beloved community. It was the insistence that such a community could exist only if we erased and forgot racial difference. I agree with bell hooks that the moral vision

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was a flawed one. Premised upon liberalism that asserts that it is autonomous, that it's independent, rational individuals who agree to bond together contractually to other autonomous, independent, rational, individuals wedded to some form of Christian theological orthodoxy that asserts that we share a common disembodied humanity, that we share something that's essentially human and that cannot sustain a movement. Perhaps we're beginning to get more of a handle on the flaw in the original thinking behind the vision and the loss of it as we face more fluid understandings of racial identity, as well as the overall shifting racial configurations that we have today.

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More people are inclined to claim biracial and multiracial identities. And the census projections point to a 50% or more non-Western white population shift in the United States by 2050. Our theological and ethical moral vision for justice then must be grounded in an understanding not of some essential humanity I cannot see, but in the flesh and bone of what is incarnated humanity.

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By incarnational, I mean that we must not deny, forget, or transcend our particularities of race, ethnicity, and gender. That we don't have to transcend our differences. We must learn how to embrace them. And that in embracing them, we actually come

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to see what it means to be created in the image of God. One theologian, an Asian theologian, gives us an interesting way to distinguish between seeing and watching. And it is this kind of seeing I'm inviting you into. Andrew Park says, Whereas seeing implies a warm intention, yielding constructive transformation,

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Watching involves a biased look, engendering harmful consequences. Seeing stands for visual dialogue and understanding, arousing sympathy. Watching for a visual dialogue that can only yield an unpleasant staring, a cold look. The courage to have constructive images of others constitutes the strength of seeing.

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The ability not to lose good images of our adversaries is critical. Our racial relationships hinge on mutual positive images, which are in turn expressions of mutual respect and mutual trust, In our ability to change, one source to which we may turn to cultivate this ability. to see, to hold positive images of ourselves, and to create the needed 21st century moral vision of beloved community is the poet.

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So in this section of the lecture, I'm inviting you now into that dialogical process of awakening moral imagination of queering about orthodoxy, and I am going to offer less of this kind of academic analysis, but I will offer instead some ruminations on the poet's words to illumine the quest only after you have heard the poet's words. I'm contextualizing this part of this dialogical process with reference to September 11, 2001.

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Now I don't do this because that event made more real, you know, what violence is, but I think it did make more real for many of us in the U.S. the effects of the relationship between religion and violence. So let's listen to some poet's words. The Dead of September 11th by Toni Morrison.

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Some have God's words. Others have songs of comfort for the bereaved. If I could pluck courage here, I would like to speak directly to the dead, the September dead. Those children of ancestors born in every continent on the planet, Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, born of ancestors who wore kilts, obis, saris, jellies, white straw hats, yamakas, goat skin, wooden shoes, feathers, and claws to cover their hair.

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But I would not say a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about nations, war, leaders, the governed and ungovernable, all I suspect about armor and entrails. First, I would freshen my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil, wanton or studied, explosive or quietly sinister, whether born of sated appetite or hunger, of vengeance or the simple compulsion to stand up before falling down. I would purge my language of hyperbole, of its eagerness to analyze the levels of wickedness, ranking them, calculating them, higher or lower status, among others of its kind.

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Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouthful of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. Because the dead are free, absolute, they cannot be seduced by blitz.

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To speak to you the dead of September, I must not claim false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say, no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself, no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become. And I have nothing to give either, except this gesture, this thread thrown between your humanity and mine. I want to hold you in my arms

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and as your soul got shot of its box of flesh to understand, as you have done, the wit of eternity, its gift of unhinged release, tearing through the darkness of its nail. And from Tama Adi Anthem, September 11, 2001, I am a Muslim from the Thomas Jefferson Mosque, I pray in the corners of the White House. I pray in the hallways of the Congress and the Pentagon.

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I am a liberal. I am a conservative. I am a Democrat. I am a Republican.

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I am a pacifist. I am a soldier. I am a feminist. I am a masculinist.

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I love responsible corporations. I hate tyrannical corporations. I am on the left. I am on the right.

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I am in the middle. Come together right now over me. Drop the labels. Talk about it.

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Find a common ground. And from Lucille Clifton, Tuesday, 9-11-01. Thunder and lightning and our world is another place. No day will ever be the same.

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No blood untouched. They know this storm in other wares, Ireland, Israel, Palestine, but God has blessed America, we sing. And God has blessed America to learn that no one is exempt.

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The world is one. All fear is one. All life, all death are one. And finally, from a Jewish author, Sharon DiBaggio, Jesus was a terrorist.

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A religious fanatic, a suicide for his cause, a martyr for us. He gave his only body that the prophecy be fulfilled. I'm not being Christian, a believer, not metaphorical. Why aren't we getting along?

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We're exactly the same people. He wasn't a Christian. He didn't say, God bless America, God bless our might. He said, Blessed be the meek.

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He said, Blessed be the merciful. He said, Blessed be the peacemakers. Through the words of these poets, images of our lives as social groups, as people on a quest for moral vision of beloved community, we are reminded how complex and complicated our lives really are. We are reminded of images of our lives as social groups together in terms of something as concrete as the particularities and the differences that we can see in the clothing we wear or the histories that can be uncovered.

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And also we see in the intangible, in the cosmic connections, the bond of death into eternity. that we all share. So in the poet's word, we find the challenges of the pain that we have inflicted upon one another through violence, through greed, through lack of courage, through fear. But we also find the hope that we must and can have if we are both bold and humble as we see each other daily, as we confess

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in the face of mass tragedy that we must abandon sentences crafted to know evil. The ideal in the quest for beloved community through poetic refraction is precisely the stuff of evoking that is stimulating memories from the past. It is the stuff of provoking that is stirring up emotion and inciting a response. It is the stuff of evoking and provoking moral imagination.

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So I'm going to conclude in an unusual way, perhaps. I'm not going to speak. I'm simply going to show you a number of images and thoughts on a PowerPoint.

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And I invite you to see, to open your mind and your heart so that there can be some awakening of your moral imagination. There are places in Havana that remind me of Savannah. Parts of West Virginia that might as well be Kingdom. Parts of New York City, parts of New York City, parts of Mississippi.

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Parts of Tennessee look like another Might as well be in our country. Might as well be in our country. To be hungry in L.A.

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It's just like starving in Bombay. Homeless in Morocco is a shelter in Chicago. Right around the corner, just down the road, right before your eyes, right underneath your nose, head to ghetto. Might as well be another country for you.

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Might as well be another country for you. The dictionary says that the ghetto is a place of minority and poverty and overpopulation. We live on this earth together, ain't no separation when you're looking down from outer space. Which is the human race, and the world is out.

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It's in every place, in every country. It's in every place, in every country. Do you see your brother when you grow? It's a small world after all.

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In the country, too, too, true, true, yeah, yeah, ghetto. What did you see? What did you see? What is your moral vision of the world's community?

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Can you join the quest? Have you lived up to your authentic, your tradition? What will it take to awaken your mom? Thank you.

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Thank you, Dr. Riggs. You are now free to go to lunch. Those who are in the class of 1961 and 1971, you have a special lunch prepared for you in McChord 201.

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And those from Austin Seminary Partners, you have a lunch prepared for you in McChord 204. And we hope to see everyone back here in the chapel at 1.30 for our next lecture. Thank you.