From inertia to (small) action

So are you going to do something?” a colleague asked Mai-Anh Le Tran. Tran, who taught Christian education at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, had just returned home after being away the weekend of Michael Brown’s murder. Tran answered by writing this book, which asks readers this same question.

Doing something is important to Tran. Her cardinal sin is non-action, which leads to a “distortion of the sacred vitality and intimacies of bodies,” made worse by our rationalization of it. The sin is particularly egregious because violence, whether active or inactive, stunts human ability to imagine a future of hope, which means that it prevents our ability to do theology and live bravely into a future we have not seen. Tran finds this violence of inaction especially present in white Protestant churches that have met calamity with “indifference, paralysis, apathy, exasperation, and even downright resistance.”

I had little choice but to engage actively in Reset the Heart to keep up with the turns in framework and vocabulary, and it was fun to do so. I felt like a new student speed-walking to keep up with a cooler, smarter, much faster upperclassman in her turns of theory and operating principles. Tran moves quickly between frameworks of pedagogy, institutions, public health, and philosophy. The book is worth reading simply for the words she explores. Phronesis (wisdom that attends to lived experiences, is transformative and change-seeking, and always interprets the lived context in light of the values and virtues of the sacred tradition) and thanatourism (a carnival of cruelty that involves voyeurism into the pain of others) were two of my favorites.