Professor Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor and affiliate professor of ethics and society at Vanderbilt, has edited and printed Faith, Race, and COVID-19: Confronting White Supremacy within the Pandemic (New York College Press, 2021), an anthology exploring the numerous challenges, racially charged acts, setbacks, triumphs and newfound hope by means of the eyes of people residing by means of one of the urgent, perplexing social crises in latest reminiscence—particularly, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
“The 12 months 2020 supplied us nice hindsight for the best way to confirm how life issues most to us,” Floyd-Thomas stated. “To be mandated to remain at house; to witness tradition wars, social unrest and COVID-19 plague, our minds and our bodies yielded a second marked by paralysis, turmoil and loss of life.
“We weren’t solely coping with racism, but additionally that of a literal plague, and as students, we desperately wanted a technique to discover catharsis,” she stated.
By the summer time of 2020, Floyd-Thomas assembled a large assortment {of professional} colleagues from various backgrounds and numerous disciplinary approaches from throughout the nation to collaborate on the edited quantity. Every scholar was invited to contribute authentic essays based mostly on their explicit analysis experience because it finest associated to the e book’s titular subject material. The e book’s chapters embody “Who’s Saving Whom?: Black Millennials and the Revivification of Spiritual Communities” by Melanie C. Jones; “Love Crafts Nations: Loving past the White Divide—A Story of Blackness, Korea, and Transformative Energy on the Damascus Highway” by Blanche Bong Cook dinner; and “Poisonous Faith, Poisonous Church buildings, and Poisonous Insurance policies: Evangelicals, ‘White Blessing,’ and COVID-19” by David P. Gushee.
“It’s a multifaceted, multidimensional scholarship that’s public-facing,” Floyd-Thomas stated. “It’s the work of over 10 students engaged and skilled within the lifetime of the thoughts to search out means to make life extra sustainable for communities that discover themselves unattended to in scholarship, on the underside of historical past and ravaged by the on a regular basis forces that threaten human flourishing.”
The work examines how the nation’s youthful generations discovered neighborhood in a digital house, racial reckonings inside the Black and Asian American populations, and the way church buildings and locations of worship developed. “We noticed these main occasions taking place from our couches and in moments the place we couldn’t collect; we noticed our Millennials and GenZers main us,” Floyd-Thomas stated. “And if it weren’t for his or her ethical management, the remainder of the world wouldn’t have been paying us any thoughts.
“Whereas not with out precedent as a lethal virus, COVID-19 represents a pandemic of unprecedented magnitude—totalizing and ubiquitous in making a loss of life toll that isn’t solely organic, however maybe additionally sociological, technological, ideological and psychological,” she stated. “This e book seeks to look at this second for its non secular significance by means of an exploration of how completely different teams acknowledge, reconcile, redeem and resurrect a way of each human and supreme significance as they confront this death-dealing actuality that’s seemingly past human management.”
Floyd-Thomas and her colleagues plan to proceed analysis on the topic sooner or later to assist the world keep in mind a historic period and the racial disparities that emerged.
“We promised not to surrender on the work or one another. This e book is a testomony to that,” Floyd Thomas stated. “It is usually to do three issues concurrently: outline the ethical crises in our midst; denounce the harm and hurt that has befallen many individuals—most particularly communities of coloration—prior to now few years for the reason that onset of the pandemic; and picture future pathways to keep away from replicating and reinforcing previous errors.”
