Background: As part of a journalism class I completed, I attended a public lecture hosted on campus and wrote an article stating what occurred and what was discussed at the most popular event of the day: the keynote address. I needed to submit a first draft within 12 hours of the event. Then, I implemented revisions and edits from my professor, who acted as my editor. For this sample, I revised the article to half of its original length. The audience is students and staff at Seattle Pacific University (SPU) who identify as Christian.
Dr. James K. A. Smith invited students and staff to “practice the prophetic” in his keynote address at Seattle Pacific University’s Day of Common Learning on Oct. 16, 2019.
Smith’s clear voice carried through the Royal Brougham Pavilion with a passion showing his knowledge and care for his subject. Adults young and old sat in rows of chairs in front of Smith or in the bleachers, with most every seat being taken.
To begin his lecture, Smith said that though Christians have gone out into the world to change the culture, many don’t realize how that culture has changed them. To solve this problem, one response we need to have is discernment, Smith said. We must “take a liturgical audit of our lives” as well as “take a liturgical audit of our institutions.”
Due to the fact that Christians have not taken this audit, white supremacism and racism are still alive in our society, Smith said. Because racism is not just a set of beliefs but also a platform on which our society has been built, even if we don’t believe racism’s tenets, it still affects our wants and desires. One “can’t think [his/her] way out of disordered loves. It takes practice,” Smith said.
Something else Christians can give their societies is art that depicts the paradox of pain and hope, and a “restoring of the imagination for the sake of the world,” Smith said. Christian art can display evil as a reality, but a reality that was defeated by God. It shows a “hope that the world could be otherwise,” Smith stated.
He used images as visual aids in his presentation, such as a photo of a white tomb with an artistic engraving down the middle, depicting a mother and a child coming out a deep crack in the center. This tomb is showing a mother who died in childbirth, and that both are escaping their grave to the resurrection, showing art that has “prophetic hope,” Smith said.
“I appreciated Smith’s discussion of racism in light of cultural liturgies, as well as the hope in his closing comments about how art might lead the way toward a restoration of our cultural imaginaries,” said Dr. Peter Wayne Moe, an associate professor of English and the Writing Director at SPU, when asked over email about his experience.
With his loud and passionate voice, his ability to make the audience laugh, and his use of “we” and “our” language, Smith made his message personal to SPU while connecting it to world issues, making for a message that was difficult to ignore.
Smith teaches philosophy at Calvin College.
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Carissa Winslow 