On the latest Mere Fidelity podcast Matt Lee Anderson, Derek Rishmawy, Andrew Wilson and I discuss the current refugee crisis facing Europe. I recently wrote a piece on the subject for Reformation21. My article provoked a lot of conversation, being discussed at length in the comments of my post and in posts written in response by Matthew Hosier and Phil Whittall (to which I wrote a very extensive response in the comments).
Take a listen and leave any thoughts in the comments!
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Alastair's Adversaria 
My wife had our first baby last Tuesday (perhaps this should’ve gone on open mic) (I’m not sure I want her name on the internet free to google :P), so I don’t think I’ll have time to listen to this, but if you haven’t, you should read Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Specifically, he argues that it is our diseased imagination, disassociating peoples from place, and Jesus from Israel, that has created the Racial imagination, and its problematic individualizing successors. (And with a baby in one hand, I can’t type much more than that now.)
Thanks for the link but, far more importantly, congratulations on the arrival of your firstborn! What wonderful news! 🙂
Thanks!
And, just to be clear (now that my wife has the baby), while some of my concerns with your article were repeated in the two articles you link to, I think Jennings, a Black Church Studies professor at Duke, comes down squarely on your side regarding the importance of place, and (along a different line) in strong agreement with your claim that it is important to remember that “Christ came to earth in the fullness of time as a Jewish male…The Jewish male body was the bearer of unique covenant meaning and Christ bore that meaning.” (Though his focus is on a Jewish body–that His body is male isn’t the focus of his inquiry.)
His thesis is that it is our forgetting of the importance of place–and the relationship between place and the people who lives in that place–and of Israel, and Jesus’ Jewishness, that has created the racial problematic, and that continues to sustain many of our own cultural pathologies. (Though, not without deep, and strong, criticism of almost all Christian traditions.)