Episode 14: Danté Stewart – The Power of Black Literature

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God—ordained podcast on the internet. 

Pete

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Intro  

Pete  

Hey folks, it’s me Pete. Before we get started with our episode today, I wanted to bug you with some info about our May class. Now I know you’ve been hearing a lot about our classes, but bear with me because this class is going to be the best yet—because I’m the one teaching it! It’s called “The History of Biblical Interpretation” and it’s happening live on May 31st from 8—9:30pm ET. And it’s a one night class surveying the seven stages of interpretation from Second Temple Judaism to post—modernity, which I am so excited to teach about.

So it’s pay what you can until the class ends and then it costs $25 to download. And if you want to access this class and future classes, yes, past and future, you can get that for $12/month through our community The Society of Normal People. And for more information and to sign up for the class, go to www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/interpretation.

Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. Today on Faith for Normal People, we’re talking about the power of Black literature with Danté Stewart.

Jared  

Danté is an award winning writer, ordained minister, and author of “Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle.”

Pete  

Right. And his work has appeared all over the place like The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and a whole bunch of places.

Jared  

Right. And don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of this episode, where we’ll reflect a little bit in Quiet Time.

Pete  

Right, here we go. Let’s get into it.

Intro  

Danté

Jared  

Welcome, Danté, to the podcast, it’s great to have you.

Danté  

What’s up, what’s up! It’s so good to be with you all.

Jared  

Alright well, we can’t, you know, have an episode about Black literature without first asking; Why does Black literature matter to you? What was your introduction to you know, writers like James Cone, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, what does it mean to you?

Danté  

Yeah, immediately for me, I go back in time to my mother’s house. And literally like I was thinking about this the other day, as I was in a writing session. So my house—I’m from the Black, rural South, a small town of about two thousand people. And my family is a very quintessential Black, southern, rural family. Very much rooted in very local grassroots political organizing, as well as like Pentecostal life, AME life, because my family is a mixture of Pentecostal, AME, and Baptist, as well as like community life. And our family was very much rooted in like NAACP there and my town is a sports town. So my family is very much rooted in this idea of like God, faith, family, football, whatever, you know what people be saying.

Pete  

Danté  

But one of the things that I remember deeply is the copy of Margaret Walker’s “Jubilee” on the shelf on—it wasn’t necessarily a shelf, it was like, a nightstand in the living room, in my mother’s small—in my parents’ house, small living room, we lived in a very small house. You know, you can literally hear the steps from the kitchen to the back of the house, and make it from the kitchen to the back of the house in literally, maybe 10 seconds. But I always remembered the books, the books, the books were everywhere. I mean, everywhere. They were in the rooms, they were in the kitchen, they were in the living room, they were in the dining room. Books and artifacts of our living was literally everywhere. So, I think for my mom, particularly, she knew the power of language, and that she knew the language that we entered into in this world as Black folk in the south and she knew the estimation of our lives that this world had for us. And she, I believe—and we’ve talked about this a lot since then—wanted to kind of surround our lives with the familial language, what people will call the mother tongue. Almost similar to what Audrey Lorde was writing in “Sister Outsider,” where she says, you know, “The white fathers told us ‘I think, therefore I am,’ But the Black mother, the poet within us, whispers in our dreams, ‘I feel, therefore I can be free.'” And so my earliest remembrance of love of literature was almost being baptized in literature in my surrounding as a youngin.

Jared  

Then, what does it mean to view Black literature as sacred text? Because you know, this is The Bible for Normal People, Faith for Normal People, we talk about both of these things. How do you view that?

Danté  

Yeah, for me, I think about the literal Bible—I know like that might be [Chuckles] a weird term for people but like, the literal, like, whatever— Whatever we call sacred text when it comes to like the Hebrew Bible in the Christian scriptures. You know, if we Evangelical, you know, Holy Bible, whatever, Pentecostal, Methodist, whatever, Holy Bible—but those of us who are on [Chuckles] on kind of the progressive side, we’re only— Like, do we even call it “Bible” anymore, bruh? 

Pete  

Danté  

Like. [Laughs] I mean, we talk about Q text, like.

Jared  

Pete  

Yeah [Laughs].

Danté  

Whatever you go to for your sacred texts in the morning with this, the Q, the M, the R, the S, the whatever. The KGB, whatever.

Danté  

The Message, [Laughing]. You think about, when you think about the sacred texts of Christian tradition, I think about the Received Text of the Jewish tradition. And like when I think about that text, I think also about like Jeremiah, and Isaiah, and Ezekiel, and Daniel, and all these books of the Bible that bear the name of real, living human beings, who came into a context, who were born into a world, who lived in that world, who died in that world, who loved in that world, who failed in that world, who hurted in that world, who’ve done miraculous things, in that world who also failed miraculously as well. No matter what their lives contain in it, there’s a community that suggests that when you read the story of this person, that you’re reading the unfolding of God in human life. You’re reading the unfolding of this story, this divine story, whereby a people have a relationship and conversation with God, and they wrestle with God, and they live with God, and they live in their world. 

And so when we think about like, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, this community testifies to the sacredness of their lives. And for me, it’s like, if their community can say, “When I look at Daniel, and I hear the story of Daniel, when I look at Jeremiah, and I hear the story of Jeremiah, if I look at Amos, and I hear the story of Amos, if I look at Job— Whether it’s a myth or reality, when I look at that story, there is something divine there and there’s something that God wants me to learn and listen to, and there’s something there that testifies with my spirit, that this too is my story.” And so, for me, it just so happened that when I begin to read deeply in Black literature around 2017-2018, after I had taken a, almost a Hajj, you know, I don’t want to kind of take from our Muslim brothers and sisters, but for real, I really resonate with that, and Malcolm X’s journey to Mecca that he took. And I resonated so deeply with that journey, because it represented a sort of transformation, and how he thought about the world and how he thought about himself and really his encounter with God and his encounter with himself. After that, I took that trip to the National Museum of African American Arts, History, and Culture, basically, what we call the Black Museum, because that term is just too long to to say in every interview—

Jared  

Danté  

—The Black Museum in DC, I was going there on a journey to search for something that I had left in the White Evangelical Church, and I really didn’t know what was calling me but I understood. Almost kind of like deja vu, it was another version of myself that the spirit was calling out of me that led me to that museum in DC. And as I traveled every single level of that museum, from the beginnings of colonialism all the way to Black music and artifacts which we have created of the world and how we made the ordinary things of life and we turned them Black. You know, all of this was speaking to me about the divinity and the sacredness of Black people’s lives. And when I started to deeply invest in that, especially reading the words that we’ve written and have chronicled in history, then I understood why people, back in a day, would say, “When I look at Jeremiah, when I look at Ezekiel, when I look at Daniel, when I look at these persons, there was something beautiful, and sacred, and divine about their life.” 

And for me, I said, if people back then can say that, like, this book deserves to bear your name and is sacred, then I believe that we also get the permission to do that right now, not just permission, but it’s a necessity. When we think about faith: Faith is only what it is because it testifies to our spirit that people who look like us actually matter and are worth listening to. Whereas Terrion Williamson said—I’ll never forget the line—where she says that “Black life is as much a starting point as anywhere else.” And so when I thought about Black literature and its sacredness, you know, I believe that James Cone, and Baldwin, and Morrison, and [Toni Cade] Bambara, and even those now like Kiese Laymon, Robert Jones, Deeshay Philyaw, Jesmyn Ward, and the likes. Jason Reynolds, Jacqueline Woodson, all of them contain within them, this spark of the divine, and the voice of the divine, and we must listen. And I believe there’s something waiting on us there.

Pete  

So there’s a sacredness obviously to scripture, because your spirit can attach to their humanity and that carries over to other literature that helps you do that, as well. Right? So there’s like an overlap between the two, right?

Danté  

Yeah, so, when I read the story of say like, 1 Samuel, or and read the story of the anointing of Solomon, and that wonderful line toward the end of that first section of that text, that “you will meet people then, you will prophesy and you will become a different person.” When I read that text, it reaches to me now, and I see the ways in which I, too, have had to change and become a different person. And when I read that text, and I encounter that text, the way that I interpret my life becomes altered and becomes different. Because I begin to understand that like, yes, there are moments in my life where people have a knowledge of things in my life and have anointed me with the words of the divine, but then I’ve had to journey a little bit, I’ve had to go to my own righteous tomb, I’ve had to go under my own tree at Tabor, at the Mount of Tabor. I’ve had people who had to ask me along the way, whether it was my therapist, or my wife, or my friends, how are you doing? I’ve had people who along the way have given me bread and filled my stomach and my soul. And I’ve known what it was like to hear the voice or experience of other people and realize that yes, I too, have become a different person. 

When I hear that it changes the way that I think about myself, or the ways in which Frederick Buechner and that texts on the sermons is the text of Frederick Buechner is on his sermons and he talks about Noah and Noah’s Ark, and any way that like, when we read the story of Noah, we anytime, you know, we reach out to one another, to take care of one another, it is our Ark. And we don’t need the New York Times to tell us or the New Yorker or the Atlantic to tell us that human beings are wretched and struggling and things like that. We just, you know, we know— We know it’s true of us, when we read the story of Noah. Or in Jesus’s text, we hear the story, the parable of the lost coin, we hear the parable of the Good Samaritan. We need not have some kind of theological construct, to understand that that too, can be our story. 

And so it’s similar when I go to Baldwin’s text, and I read in “Go Tell It on the Mountain” that the young protagonist was looking for love to which he desired, but did not have early on, when it was in a part about the teacher. Then I realized I remember the times in my life when I’ve looked for love and couldn’t find it. Or when I read Bambara’s text in “Gorilla, My Love”, the lesson, and read that text and realize these children, looking at FAO Schwartz looking through the store, and can’t get what they’re looking for. And the teacher teaches them the lesson, that there is a barrier between your desire and what this world actually wants to give to you. Then I understand, I understand, too, that there have been moments in my life, where in this world, there have been barriers placed between me and my joy. And in both of those instances, whether it’s the sacred texts of the Bible, or whether it’s the sacred texts of Black literature, or even other literature, I realized that there is something that I hear that helps me better understand my own story. And it’s back to what, you, Pete, talk about, you know, wisdom. You know, in your book, I understand a greater depth of wisdom as Maya Angelou would suggest, that wisdom is in some sense, the heart of life and as you say, is the heart of you know, the sacred texts, or heart of faith, you know, the wisdom so that we may better understand what it means to be human and what it means to take our faith seriously.

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Jared  

Yeah, I’m hearing that texts become sacred when they have this trait that allows us to resonate with it, where it reflects back to us what it means to be human and not in some, “I think, therefore, I am,” not some esoteric, generic sense. But whenever it really becomes a tool of wisdom for my own experiences where I can better understand how to navigate the world in this body with the experiences I have, and there are certain texts that resonate with us, they reflect back to us our experiences and in that way, these texts are sacred texts.

Danté  

Oh, yeah and it gets back to the power of story. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Danté  

That is the power of story and what story does to human beings. You know, my granddaddy, as he got older, he was in the late stages of dementia. And my granddaddy ends up falling and has to go to the hospital. A few days later, my granddaddy is on a ventilator, because they say he has COVID. Two or three days after that, I’m at my aunt’s funeral, who was his oldest daughter, and at that funeral, I’ll never forget, toward the end of the funeral as the pastor, the preacher, was eulogizing her, we had a praise break. And it was something beautiful about, you know, in the midst of grieving that we were able to have a praise break in that moment as we heard the story of God’s love and the story of this one spectacular life. 

On my way back home, my mom called me and my granddaddy, she tells me that granddaddy is breathing very hard. I already prepared myself, you know, for granddaddy, you know—to wake up either the next morning or the next morning after that, or the morning after that, to the news that granddaddy was not alive, and that just so happened that that next morning, literally the day after his oldest daughter’s funeral, granddaddy passes away. And I go on Facebook, I see my granddaddy dancing with his hands in his pocket, or whatnot, and my brother put up the caption “Got damn, cut sugar!” You know, because they call him “[undistinguishable] cut sugar, Granddaddy cut sugar. The sweetest thing on this side of the Congaree River.” Which runs alongside the area where I grew up called Sugar Hill. 

My granddaddy has his funeral, I speak at my granddaddy’s funeral, we go back for the repass, I’m sitting down with Mr. Charles Earl, who’s a man, a brilliant, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, Black man. An old, big, beautiful Black man who has a really deep voice [lowers pitch of voice] like this. But he has something of a spark to him because he’s a Black man who’s up in age like my granddady was. They understood what it was like to be Black and American [Chuckles], and Black and rural and American and had to endure all of these things. So I’m sitting down with Mr. Earl, Mr. Earl takes his cane, put it between his legs, and takes a bite from his food, we eat and we laugh, and we’re joking. 

Mr. Earl asked me a question, he say, “Danté, have you ever been on a cruise ship?” I said, “Mr. Earl, ain’t ever been on no cruise ship.” And he says, “Well, well you should go on one.” I said, “Alright, Mr. Earl, I’ll go, I’ll take a cruise, someday.” You know, he’s like, “You know what I do every time I get off the cruise ship?” I say, “What you do, Mr. Earl?” He says, “I always put my feet in water.” I say, “What?” You know, I look at him like his bread ain’t done and things like that. I said, “Why you do that for?” He says, “I do this because I want to remind myself that in these waters that I put my feet in somebody either swam here or drowned.” And he looks at me and pauses and he tells me, “when you look at yourself, realize, somebody has survived the swim.” That’s one story. That’s one way to tell the story. But the other way to tell the story is to go back to the Exodus texts. And realize that those two stories are the same story. The story of people who were under massive oppression, learning how to survive the swim. That’s the power of it. Whether it’s reading on the tounge, coming out of the belly of a person, or written in books, coming from the mind and the heart of the person. My friend Jason Reynolds says this, he says, what we’re able to do with 26 letters is the closest thing we got to magic. It is alchemy. 26 letters, you put them together, rearrange them, you can burn the whole world down. 26 letters, you rearrange them, you can put the world back together.

Pete  

Well, Danté, how do you think about God differently? You know, I mean, how has your thinking about God changed maybe through your interaction with Black literature? Right, any— You’re talking a lot about it now. That’s actually I think what you’re talking about, you’re talking about God right now and your relation with God and how it affects your community and all. But how has that affected you? You know, people read C.S. Lewis, right, or something and they say “this has changed my faith, blah, blah, blah.” Have you had similar experiences reading Black literature?

Danté  

Oh, 100%. I’ll never forget the day… It was literally—I’ll never forget I was in the White evangelical church, at this point. I was preaching, teaching, leading in that space, ascending in the seminary context, doing my work at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Reformed Theological Seminary and I was kind of you know, that Black dude that’s in the white space. There’s, you know, “trying to save white people,” “trying to make white people do better.” I was trying to figure out, you know, how to be Black and trying to find myself as a Black person, because at that moment, I had lost myself so much. I assimilated so much to the point where, you know, I was Christian first and not Black. And so, as the Donald Trump presidency was going and Black people were dying—you know, I’ll never forget Alton Sterling and Philando Castile being murdered and then a few weeks later, you know, a few months later, you know, this Donald Trump thing is popping off and it’s kind of in full effect. 

I’m asked to preach, and things like that and I preach in this gymnasium where the church is getting renovation I preach in the gymnasium, and I realize, like “Dad, yo, like, just ain’t my place no more.” So I went on a journey, which led me to the Black Museum. But I’ll never forget reading Martin Luther King’s “Where Do We Go from Here” which my boy, Drew Hall—a big ol’ husky white brother from the south, my boy Drew Hall gave me a copy of Martin Luther King’s, “Where Do We Go from Here,” in that book, Martin Luther King quotes James Baldwin. And in quoting James Baldwin, he says that what you have endured, and what they make you go through is not a testament to your inferiority. But it is a testament to their insecurity and their fear. And so when I read that text, I was like, I gotta read “The Fire Next Time.” And so I bought a copy of “The Fire Next Time,” and I read “The Fire Next Time” near like two or three times over three or four weeks. And I get to that point that Baldwin says in the second half, “Down at the cross, if the concept of God has any use or validity, it can only make us more larger, more freer, and more loving. And if God cannot do this, then we better had get rid of him.” 

And so as I came in contact with that text, I realized at that moment, that my view of God did not make me larger, more loving. My view of God made me smaller, and more arrogant. And this, I think, was the dangers of discipleship within evangelical churches and beyond. You know, especially regarding certainty, and controlling God, you know—we like a faith where we can control who God is, you know, but we say this all the time as evangelicals, the incomprehensibility of God, we love that incomprehensibility that—that there is a part of God that we cannot know. And then we say, “God is incomprehensible.” And then in the other hand, we say, if you do not believe in God, or believe in theology the way that I do, then you’re going to hell, or that you are less than or that you are not enough or that you’re not loved, et cetera, et cetera. 

And so like for me, to encounter Baldwin, was for me to question like, “Danté, what God do you really believe in? What God do you really believe loved this world?” And the biggest shift that happened for me was when I understood that God just doesn’t love me. God loves the world. We say it all the time. God loves us. But we need to ask, who is the “us” in the sentence? And if that “us” isn’t expansive, and reflects the heart of God, then that “us” is not the God as God has revealed in the sacred texts. And so for me, my understanding of God expanded to say like, “Yo, it is okay for me to redefine my relationship with God. I lose nothing.” 

You know, I had a friend, a few weeks ago, she leads small group, and somebody came to small group and asked her, you know—now this was me, Reverend Danté Stewart, this is me putting on the Reverend Danté Stewart hat in this moment. A person came to small group, they were reading the Bible and reading the Genesis text. And they were kind of struggling going through, like, “Yo, if God knew that, like, they were going to eat the fruit, does that mean that, you know, God was caught by surprise?” So this person in small group, you know, everyday Christian, they ain’t in seminary. You know, and things like that, you know, they just got a real question. And so my friend asked me, she was like, “Danté, like, you know, how you would’ve respond?” And so I told her, I was like—because they was wondering about God’s power. Is God powerful? And I told her, I was like, “You know what? For me, it’s okay for things to catch God by surprise.” Because my idea of God’s power isn’t based on, God has to control all things at every moment at any given circumstance. My idea of God’s power is that no matter the circumstance, God can reorient his direction. For me? That is moving from certainty to hope. I am hope-filled when I understand that my relationship and God’s relationship to the things that happen in this world is guarded by the divine heart.

Pete  

Yeah, I mean, our friend Tom Oord, who’s a theologian, he talks like that too. You know, “the sovereignty and power of God directing all things sovereignly, blah, blah.” The God of love doesn’t control, you know? And so it’s, you know, for God to be caught by surprise, that’s almost the cost of doing business, if you’re going to be a God of love, and not a God of just like a king, pointing fingers and making things happen, sovereignly. That… It’s hard to think of God, as… You say, “heart.” You know, I think, personally, it’s hard to think of God as love, when you just can’t relate to somebody. You know, who like, has everything under— Like, every step is planned for you, right, that kind of thing. I think it’s hard to relate to a God like that.

Danté  

I mean, for some people. You know. But I think for some people, they need it. And it’s okay. It’s okay for people to need a God that controls things—because this was the other part of the conversation. My friend responded. She said, “It makes me feel better, you know, that, like, God knows what God is doing.” And I’m like, “That’s okay as well!” And like this the thing. When it comes to like theology and faith in the practice of it, and being Christian, and living together, and trying to be better to one another, it means that like, “Yo, it’s okay for you, to need your version of God, that tries to make you as most loving as possible.” Because at some moments—I ain’t gonna lie—I like the idea, the idea of a guy who controls is alluring. It is very alluring, you know. And at moments in my own life, I need that. Just like there are moments where I need a church experience that’s just straight speaking in tongues, and high worship and like, and it’s thick in it, like my church right now, where I’m, where I’m at. It gets thick every Sunday, it gets thick every Sunday! 

You know, but then there are also moments where like, well, I just want to sit back in my chair, in the orange chair in my room and, like, kind of read a heavy theology book. And I think that’s how we hold faith better. It is okay for you to need what you need. But it is also not okay for in your needing what you need, for that need to supersede another person’s humanity, or another person’s desire to be free. That’s when I got a problem with that. That’s my big problem with many of our faith traditions that become unloving. It’s not that they hold their faith traditions, or their ideas, or framework, with a tight hand only. It’s that, like, they can’t even perceive a world in which the experience and the faith of another person is as real and as powerful and as beautiful as their own. And if we can stay away from that, even as people who like arguing about Q and T and P and M and—

Pete  

Danté  

And whatever that is, or like, you know, [Chuckling] you know, whatever we want to argue about like, argue about it, cool, cool. Knock it out, dig it out, whatever. But at the end of the day, come back to the center and the center almost always must be our first thing and that must be love.

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Jared  

Yeah, I’m glad that you said that. Because that, for me is often the case. There is a diversity, but there is a center or filter of love. It’s sort of these different interpretations or different frameworks for faith, those can all be tools. But if they’re not tools toward a more just, and a more loving, world and relationship with our neighbors and ourselves, then that’s when it becomes problematic. It’s not really the content as much as the container and the filter through which we’re talking about these things. Because, yeah, I agree. And I would think that a lot of times power dynamics and cultural dynamics play a role in whether a God of ultimate control or the existence of Hell and that sort of thing is a tool toward hate or exclusion or fear or whether it’s a tool towards justice and love. And some of those things can happen just in the context of different people groups and different experiences and cultures.

Danté  

Yeah, one hundred. And we got to take that honestly, like, my backgrounds in sociology, so like whenever I came to like the Bible, when I came to myself as a person, like I really leaned on my kind of sociological background as an undergraduate, and the many conversations that me and my professors would have about, like faith, and society, and the human reality, and social relations, and whatever, whatever, whatever. You know, and I think that’s like a big key is like, yo, we got to think about where our things come from, like they come from a place. And we better had thought about that place. Like people love the Protestant Reformation. Right? And they say, “Semper Reformanda,” you know, and things like that. And Soli Deo Gloria and Sola Scriptura and Sola Sola whatever, you know, Five Solas, right? But, be clear, them saying people were drowning babies in the river, because somebody didn’t believe the way they believe. They tied them up, put them in a chair—just like we sit on, to them people, women, children, men didn’t matter—and threw them in a river. Like, it didn’t matter, “We’re gonna throw you in a river. And guess what? We’re gonna go Sunday,” whatever they worship, the Lord’s day. Just like those in early America or middle—right after Reconstruction—you know in the time of lynching. You know, praising God on Sunday, and next thing, you know, Sunday afternoon, we’re gonna go lynch some folk. 

And even today, like all of these things come from somewhere, and we better had thought about history and context and power. Like, I don’t care how good my theology makes me feel. If my theology comes from a context, in which people believed it was okay to drown a human being, if they believe it was okay to murder a human being, if they believe it was okay for you to like, justify war against other people, If it was okay for you to like, disregard people, then, there, that toxicity cannot but be in the way I hold my theology. Because it comes from a place of toxicity. And I think like, [Chuckles] think about Jesus, when Jesus says, “You know, hey. You have heard it said, but I say to you.” And for me, it was as if Jesus is saying to them, “You know, there were toxic theologies and practices that you inherited, and is not your fault. And there are those things that must be rethought and re—understood and reimagined. You lose nothing from what that tradition or theology gave you. You gain everything when you allow that theology and tradition to be criticized, and to become better.” And whenever we can’t do that bro? Hey… That theology dead bro. Nietzsche was right! Nietzsche was right, that theology dead, baby.

Jared  

Well, with that, because I appreciate that idea of allowing our preconceived ideas, inherited traditions, theological traditions to be critiqued and I think, for me, reading Black literature did that, sometimes explicitly, but sometimes more just implicitly by showing a new set of experiences. So, if somebody is new to reading Black literature as a spiritual practice, as a way to expand their theological imagination, what would you advise them to do to start? How do they begin?

Danté  

Oh, man. I always go to Sister Maya, bro. Maya Angelou is the beginning, the middle, the end. Act One, act two, act three. You know, and that’s the thing I love about Maya Angelou that blesses me—and really what I try to do as Reverend Danté Stewart, the writer—Maya Angelou had a beautiful way of taking her faith seriously, but also holding her faith humbly. And she was a lover of life. She loved life. She loved the idea that there can be something had in a book, or the smile of the child, or the way her aunt, and those Black domestic workers, would turn a broom into a microphone, or would turn a dustpan into a tambourine when the white folk left their home, or there’s something beautiful that can be found in a friendship—like the way she had with James Baldwin—or even, you know, realizing like the complexity of our lives, that we hold multitudes. That like, I am not everything that people will want from a Reverend, or this person is not everything that people will want from them. And I think she holds it in such a beautiful, beautiful way, that for me, has been life giving. 

Between the months of September 2nd 2021 to about April 2022, I went through some of the most deepest, darkest, depressive moments in my life. I went through grief and tragedy of unutterable proportions. And 2023 was the first time that I learned that I have Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and C-PTSD. And here I am, busy, working, writing, taking care of my family, my two toddlers, trying to make a living out of this thing called writing. Showing up to Sunday week in and week out and found myself in like, darkest of darkest places, bro, which struggled with panic attacks. And it was just absolutely horrible. Terrible [Laughing] for me and my life. But I’ll never forget stumbling upon a copy of “Wouldn’t Take Nothin’ For My Journey Now.” And stumbling upon that book and reading that book, and I read this line. She talks about planned pregnancies, and talked about when a woman plans her pregnancy, there is the experience of noticing so much more, that you pay attention to so much more, you notice so much more, you notice things that you were anticipating, that you were planning this, you wanted it to happen, and this happened. And now because you planned it, there’s the expectation and you just noticing so much more about it. 

And she says if we can approach life not as a common thing, but approach it with persistent imagination, then life will give us immense gratification. And for me, when I read that line, I changed—because she was talking about pregnancy. I said if I can think about my writing not as a common thing, or my depression, not just simply as a common thing. But like, approach it persistently imaginative, my struggles as a father, as a husband, someone who’s trying to write and make a living out of there, somebody who comes from one of the poorest areas of South Carolina, someone who has changed and evolved and grieved and had to carry all of that heartbreak. And when I think about, you know, if I can approach you know, my faith as if it’s not a common thing, or something that’s like working out or cutting the grass or checking on a friend or reading a book or recording an interview, and do it persistently imaginatively, then it can give back to me immense gratification. Because I would have learned the power and the key to all of life, which is simply being present with it so as when it’s time to tell what happened, we actually remember it. 

So if people want to start, start with Maya. And then go from Maya, and search “Black writers in history” and shoot and pick anything. And just go from there. Now, if you the more academic type, my academic work is actually in Black literature and theology. I did my thesis at Emory on Baldwin and Baldwin’s theology, it’s entitled “What We Did Was Not Supposed to Happen: James Baldwin, the Black Sacred, Imagination, and the Stories That Free Us.” And actually was fun about this, the dope part, is though I was a Divinity School student, my thesis advisor was in the English department at the University, which was an amazing, amazing experience. And she had me read in this book and buy all these—she basically put me on a speed [Laughing] like, a speed journey through like, a graduate level English degree. And there’s a book entitled “The New Cavalcade,”—it may be out of print may not be out of print—but it’s an anthology of Black writing from the 1700s to present that she uses. You know, there’s also the book “The History of the African-American Novel.” There’s also the book by Josef Sorett entitled “Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics.” You know, you can start with those but get an anthology of Black literature and just swim in it and read it and have fun with it. There’s so much there.

Jared  

Thank you, Danté, for coming on. And I really want to thank you for just dipping into a little bit more about your personal story. I think that resonates and that persistent imagination and kind of a re-enchantment and that does tie to—I mean, it kind of comes full circle for, again, these texts that resonate with us, our sacred texts, because we have the imagination for having them be sacred texts. We can re-enchant these things insofar as we pay attention to how they resonate with us. So, thank you so much for coming and sharing some of your story and your love of Black literature. I feel like that kind of just oozes through when you talk and it’s, it’s infectious. So thank you for that.

Danté  

Oh, man, thank y’all for having me on. I really enjoyed it.

Ad Break  

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time.

Pete  

With Pete and Jared. 

Pete  

Alright, Jared, you said—and I’m quoting you here—”Texts become sacred when they reflect back to us what it means to be human whenever it becomes a tool of wisdom for my own experiences.” Now, Danté, then he responded in agreement, right? And said, “That’s the power of story.” So, for you, what stories come to mind when you think about, you know, this relationship to your spirituality, your body, or your experience?

Jared  

What I want to initially say is that I don’t do well with story. But I think that’s actually incorrect. I think I do respond to certain kinds of stories. I think there are people who really… They resonate with story as such, and so all kinds of stories resonate with them. I think, for me, it’s much more limited. But when I think about the go-to’s, there are kind of three categories of story. You know, there are for me, like movies and music tell stories for me that I resonate with a lot. You know, my go-to story—and I haven’t really unpacked why—is “The Great Gatsby.”

Pete  

Jared  

It’s sort of my comforting… I’ve listened to the audiobook, maybe five or six times, I’ve read it two or three times, I’ve watched the movie three or four times. Something about that story resonates with me in how—

Pete  

I did not see that coming by the way.

Jared  

Left field, huh? [Laughing]

Pete  

Totally, I did not see that coming at all. Okay.

Jared  

I kept it to myself—we’re supposed to be like, opening up here, you know?

Pete  

I know, but—

Jared  

Faith for Normal People. 

Pete  

Jared  

But then I wanted to take it a step further, because I think the stories for me that have become more and more sacred, as I’ve gotten older are less those that I hold at a distance, and more stories from my family. Both my extended family and the stories that shaped them, like when we sit around family, and we’ve had a couple of drinks, what are the stories that come to the surface, both that make us mad—there’s some stories in our family that causes fights almost every time—there are some stories that make us laugh. And so those stories resonate with me and show me not what it means to be human in an abstract sense—which I think I was more interested in when I was younger—and more, what does it mean for me to be a human in my embodied context? And so family stories ground me in a way that wasn’t true when I was younger. So any of those that help me feel seen and help me feel heard, I think, are the stories that become sacred for me. What about you? How would you answer that question for yourself? 

Pete  

Well, I would say that the stories that I can think of—like you, I’m not… I’m just too left brainish. You know what I mean? 

Jared  

Mhmm, yep.

Pete  

And that’s a problem. That’s not an asset, folks. 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

Trust me. There’s a downside to this, right—But I think the stories that I connect with are ones that give me… That get me out of my head, actually, that gives me a different vision for just what it means to live. And—I may have mentioned this before, but I, you know, I hate to say—it’s “Lord of the Rings,” I can, you know, I can watch those movies every year. You know, I don’t want to read the book. I don’t have time. But I do want to sit there and watch—the cinematography, it just captures things that I just think is— It lets my imagination see myself in a different setting. How would I— What would I do in that situation? So that, to me, that’s pretty powerful. I also love the movie (these are things that have actually had an impact on me) like when I watched “The Tree of Life”, I was stunned after I watched that. Just the sweeping scope of explaining so much of big reality going back to evolution and also family problems and sort of like sweeping that. It’s a story that really was meaningful to me. And I’m probably not even sure why but I just sort of liked the big picture. [Laughing] I hate to say this because people are gonna laugh at me. But I don’t care! We’re being vulnerable, right? 

Jared  

Right.

Jared  

Pete  

I… Sometimes I’m looking for things to watch because I’m bored. And I say “Don’t watch the Marvel movies again, don’t watch them again. You just saw them, you just watched them all earlier this yea. Don’t do it— But I want to do it— Don’t do it, no, be sophisticated, watch a documentary now.” I go back and forth. But there’s something about, especially origin stories of superheroes that have captivated me since probably I was three years old. 

I used to put a cape—not a cape actually, a towel or a little, like, a blanket—around my neck and and jump off the sofa like I was flying and I remember coming home from school once, walking home because I didn’t live far, and thinking if I ran fast enough I’d make enough wind under my sails to jump up a little bit. So yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that really has meant a lot to me. But like you, it’s also learning to see my life against the backdrop of a family story.

And my sister, and I may have mentioned this at some point, but she’s sort of like the family archivist and she does genealogical research. And I have names now going back hundreds of years on my family, and it’s on a tree, you know, and I look at it, I say, “I’m just so connected to these people,” which gives me a different point of view. 

Jared  

Mhmm, yeah.

Pete  

So, those are ways that stories are, I think, helping me see beyond my limited analytical gaze.

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

And so I appreciate it.

Jared  

Yeah.

Pete  

So yeah.

Jared  

Pete  

And maybe that’s kind of the bigger point is how, yeah, stories just get us out of that. 

Pete  

Yeah. Right. 

Jared  

Well, Danté also talks about this shift around interrogating what it meant to say “God loves us,” and to ask the question, “Who is the ‘us’?” Have you ever had to redefine what an us meant?

Pete  

Oh, man. All the time. Yeah, yeah, for me, definitely. And I mentioned this in “Curveball” a little bit and in some other settings too, but just moving beyond, you know, the Christian tribe, and even more narrowly the Christian tribe that I recognize as Christian tribe. And just seeing the “us” meaning everyone. You know, and hopeful Christian ultimate redemptionism kind of thing. You know, just, I’m in the Christian story, obviously, but thinking of us in as expansive of a way as possible. Otherwise, I think we’re limiting, even what we mean by “God is love.”

Jared  

Pete  

And I think if we limit that, I started having some intellectual, analytical problems with that, you know, so.

Jared  

Well, and that, for me, to tie into that—the first thing that I thought of was going through this time where it changed the nature of prayer for me. Because there was this common prayer style in my tradition, and for me, that was exclusivistic. And I mean that in the sense of praying for my team to win a game. 

Pete  

Jared  

Yeah.

Pete  

Nobody does that. 

Jared  

Praying that we would get a good parking spot, praying for good fortune for me—which is not bad in itself—but the realization for me when I had to redefine the “us,” was the recognition that sometimes those prayers are zero—sum games. That if I win, someone else loses. 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

And so the “us” is not big enough. It is us at the expense of them. And my prayer life reflected that us/them mentality. When it came to, then, more nationalistic agenda items, for sure. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

I had to redefine “us” where it was sort of, we’re praying for us, our military. We’re praying for our President. In this universal sense, that’s fine. But when it gets pitted against us, we’re praying for “us” so that we win against “them,” then it becomes problematic.

Pete  

It sounds very non-Jesusy to me. You know, the Gospels and stuff, it just doesn’t sound right to me.

Jared  

Well, and it gets really tricky. Because when you’re convinced that the “us” is doing the right thing for the “them.” 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

You can justify just about anything. But, we need to win—

Pete  

But if we win, somebody else loses.

Jared  

Well, if I’m in America, if we win, then we spread democracy, which is what God wants for all of us. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

So anyone who’s resisting democracy, is doing it at their own peril. It’s almost paternalistic. We know better for them, what’s good for them, than they do. And that kind of us vs. them. Again, it’s well intend— I guess my point is, it’s well intentioned. Sometimes it’s this villainized “them,” but more often than not, it was like, “No, no, no, you just don’t understand. Let us conquer you and tell you how to do it the right way and then you’ll understand why we were right all along.”

Pete  

Jared  

And that can be militaristic. That could be Evangelicalism, in the terms of evangelism. 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

It can be any of those things. And so for me, that’s where, I think, I had to redefine “us” in this much broader sense, which is a scary thing.

Pete  

And I think, you know, politically or religiously, that’s been the way of civilization ever since we’ve known it. This is not new, you know?

Jared  

Pete  

Yeah, it has. Exactly in this way, that I don’t think God is coercive, or standing there with the divine arms folded, annoyed that we’re not getting it. I can’t— I just, I can’t, I can’t believe that. And the notion of—you know, we both were a part of a tradition where God’s primary characteristic is sovereignty. 

Jared  

Mhmm.

Pete  

Everything stems from that. And Tom and others say, “Well, maybe it’s God’s love and everything— God’s sovereignty has to be seen in light of God’s love, not the other way around.”

Jared  

So, to make that clear, whatever we say about God’s sovereignty, it has to comport with “God as loving.”

Pete  

The more— 

Jared  

Rather than the other way around—

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

—Which was, well, we can say that God’s loving, but whatever we mean by that has to comport with has to fit within this definition of sovereignty that we know is correct.

Pete  

That God can do whatever God wants to do with anybody, at any time, even if it sounds capricious, it’s still consistent with love. That’s the problem that a lot of people have had. And I began having it as well. 

Jared  

And its sovereignty gets to define love.

Pete  

Right. So, God’s love is understood in the context of control. And—again, I probably have mentioned this someplace because I love this book—but William Placher wrote a book, “Narratives of a Vulnerable God,” he died a few years ago, he was a Presbyterian theologian—but you started reading that book, and it’s like, “No, it’s not sovereignty. The God of scripture is actually vulnerable and engaging and affected by creation and things like that.” And I— That’s just— It just made me— That’s one of many things that has made me think very differently of God. And it’s not because you know, we’d like to tickle itching ears, and we don’t like a God telling us what to do kind of nonsense. It’s just, no, it just makes sense.

Jared  

Right. Well, I think that’s a good question to keep exploring. And I think we’ll probably have more folks on like Tom Oord and others who can help us parse through some of the implications of a God who doesn’t control because I do think that’s—

Pete  

I hope so, yeah.

Jared  

—Very baked into a lot of our understanding of God. 

Pete  

Mhmm. Right. Yeah. 

Jared  

And it may not be all bad in the sense of, you know, there’s a lot of theologies from oppressed and marginalized people where having a God of control was actually very helpful. 

Pete  

Right. 

Jared  

And so we have to take that into account as well. 

Pete  

Exactly right, yeah, yeah. 

Jared  

Alright. Thanks, everyone. 

Outro  

Jared  

Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.  

Pete  

And, if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join.  

Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.  

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.

Outro  

Outro  

Danté  

And I was kind of, you know, that Black dude that’s in the white space that’s, you know, trying to “save” white people, trying to try to make white people do better, and trying to—

Pete  

Did it work?

Danté  

Pete  

Danté  

Would I be— Would I be talking to you if it worked? No!

Jared  

Yeah, right.

Danté  

You got your own answer there, brother!

Pete  

Yeah, right.