Topic: Untrolling America: What Trump Gets Right and Democrats Get Wrong About White America

Presenter(s): Thandeka

Donald Trump and the next generation of Trump politicians affirm what most white American voters feel: abused, afraid, outraged, and neglected. And Trump politicians promise what these voters want: an end to their suffering. Presently, most Democrats, mainstream Republicans, Black Americans, liberals, progressives, and conservatives can’t parse the white suffering without distorting it and thus are clueless about how to end it. Thandeka calls the requisite new non-partisan work on white suffering  “Untrolling America” and will explain it in process terms, advancing John Cobb’s interest in “process theology as political theology.”

Thandeka is the president and founder of  Love Beyond Belief™—a 501c3 education foundation designed to help clergy and laity, activists and educators who use community-building processes to deepen connections that  heal and transform the world. To this end, Love Beyond Belief™ offers workshops, courses, consultations, educational resources and eventually certification programs that help persons practice the heart of compassion through small group spiritual practices that bolster and sustain their social justice and eco-justice work. Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness (Polebridge Press, MN, 2018) is her constructive theological and neuroscientific framework for healing and transforming the world. In the foreword to this most recent book, John Cobb wrote, “Thandeka has written a book of rigorous scholarship, brilliant original insight, and great practical importance….Having read it, I will never be able to think of my theological heritage in the same way again.” 

The name Thandeka, which means “beloved” in Xhosa, was given to her by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984. Thandeka is the founder of Contemporary Affect Theology, which investigates the links between religion and emotions using insights from affective neuroscience. Thandeka’s academic positions include a visiting scholar at the Center for Process Studies, a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University, as well as positions at Harvard, Brandeis, and Andover Newton Theological School. Before receiving her PhD in philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate University, she was an Emmy award-winning  television producer for 16 years.

Read more about Thandeka at: https://revthandeka.org/.

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