Come Go With Me

Howard Thurman and a Gospel of Radical Inclusivity

De: C. Anthony Hunt

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This book will examine Howard Thurman's life, ministry and writings in light of the concern of how radically inclusive community might be conceived, articulated and appropriated for the church and society today and in the future.

Not a fan of AI Narration

Summary: An introduction to Howard Thurman focusing on the role of radical inclusivity in his work.

This is the fourth book by or about Thurman I have read this year. I am pretty familiar with Thurman at this point, but I find that many of the book written about him are mostly introductory, but often do not overlap significantly. This is an incredible reality for Thurman because his work was often so diverse, that many people can write introductions to his work from various perspectives and yet not overlap with much of their focus.

Howard Thurman was a theological and philosophical forerunner of the civil rights movement and a spiritual director and mentor to its leadership. But he was also an expert in mysticism, interfaith cooperation and learning, the role of non-violence, personal spiritual disciples and other areas. As has often been reported, he was advised by an early white mentor to avoid the academic study of racial issues because it would cause people to pigeonhole him into only being “a race man.” Thurman both understood why that advice was given and resented the advice (and somewhat followed it.)

Thurman’s work simply was influenced by his social location and experience. That is not a controversial statement, but there is no way that he couldn’t have been influenced by being primarily raised by a grandmother who had been enslaved or by having to be a boarding student for high school because there were no local high schools that admitted black students. There is no way that he couldn’t have been influenced by the ways that he broke color barriers throughout his life. As Thurman pointed out in his memoir, the White mentor thought that it was possible for Thurman to not center race in his work, but didn’t really understand how race had been centered in the experience of the whole United States.

Come Go With Me has biography, and it covers many of the themes of Thurman’s books. And it traces how Thurman’s work both broke new ground and was rooted in the tradition of the Black Church in the US. It is not a straight biography and not a straight thematic review of Thurman’s literary work. It is primarily a reflection on how this theme of radical inclusivity can be something that we learn from today while giving enough background to understand the role that Thurman played in helping to construct a movement of racial inclusivity.

It is very much not overlapping with Raphael Warnock’s Divided Mind of the Black Church, but the two books do complement one another by approaching their subjects in very different ways but giving supplementary information to the reader. Warnock is doing historical theology by tracing the historical development and themes of Black theology over time. Warnock’s conclusion is that true Black theology is radically inclusive and there is always a tension between that movement toward racial inclusivity and pietism.

C. Anthony Hunt does contextualize Thurman, but he is primarily looking at Thurman as an individual, not as a representative of the whole Black church. Thurman was a mystic and that mysticism and orientation to embracing God as an unexplainable other was part of what left Thurman open to learning. He was a voracious reader and had a brilliant mind, but he didn’t limit his work to pure academic study. He traveled to India and met with Gandhi was forever shaped by the experience of travel and people that were different from him. He was experientially a mystic from a very young age, but he also studied that from different traditions academically. He didn’t just teach and lead, he acted to start a radically inclusive church in San Francisco in the mid 1940s.

I think the whole book is helpful, but it is a book that is designed to teach for a purpose. There is a clear culmination in the final chapter that is exploring what we can take from learning about Thurman today. I am going to quote two passage, not as summary, but as two of the takeaways that I personally though were important.

Thomas Merton pointed out that the test of our sincerity in human association in the practice of nonviolence and movement toward radically inclusive community is: “are we willing to learn something from our adversaries?” If a new truth is made known, will we accept it? The dread of being open to the ideas of others generally comes from our hidden insecurity about our own convictions. We fear that we may be “converted” – or perverted – by a pernicious doctrine. On the other hand, if we are mature and objective in our open-mindedness, we may find that in viewing things from a basically different perspective we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideals more realistically. (p156)

and

Religion is to be viewed as a process, and must now be understood in global context. It is no longer an option to confine religious thinking and practice to narrow and particular cultural contexts. In postmodernity, cultures are brought into closer contact by technology. Cousins offered the illustration of an astronaut who travels into space for the first time, and looks down upon the earth. The astronaut is overwhelmed with what they see, as they now view the earth from a new and broader perspective. Likewise, a new global reality causes us to view the world from a different (perhaps broader) perspective. (p158)
There is always a danger in books like this that they can distort the subject for the purposes of the author. But I have read enough of Thurman to know that Come Go With Me is handing the subject well. There is a very close reading of Thurman and his life. Hunt has done the work to understand him well so that he can explore how we might also learn from him well. This is not hagiography, but it is honoring of an elder that I wish more people knew more about.

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This is not really part of the main post, but I did see that the audiobook was a AI generated audiobook that was only a $0.99 add on to the kindle book and I decided to try it out for one chapter. I generally am not a fan of AI narration and this did not change my mind. I understand the value of AI reading for those who need narration for one reason or another. But as good as the technology is, it isn’t as good as a good narrator who is familiar with the subject. Words were mispronounced, pauses ended up in the wrong place. And the very nature of AI means that real narrators who had done good work, had their work taken without any compensation or acknowledgment. (a type of theft). I am not a fan of this type of work, but I do also understand why people get it. It is cheap, it is “good enough” and it can serve as a necessary point of access for people with disabilities or other constraints that can’t read the print text for one reason or another. But I will not be persuaded to support AI narration as a widespread practice.