Dear Nimi, congratulations on this remarkable and certainly a well-deserved honor. Your election into this prestigious club of gurus is a recognition of your erudite scholarship. Thanks for making us proud. I hope I will see you in Greenville, Texas, in June, and “we go wash am” with pounded yam and egusi stew, without delving into the “theological territory of rituals…” in the words of Moses!
On March 27, 2018 at 4:54 PM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:Professor Wariboko Elected to the American Theological Society
Dr. Nimi Wariboko, the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University has been elected to the esteemed American Theological Society, the oldest theological society in North America. Founded in 1912, the Society is limited to one hundred scholars who are systematic or constructive theologians, ethicists, philosophers, biblical scholars, historians, and practical theologians. Members are nominated and elected based on their established record of contributions to the field of theological inquiry. The society meets once a year in the spring to discuss papers and research results of its members.
The Dean of Boston University School of Theology (STH), Dr. Mary Elizabeth Moore in her announcement of the news to the STH faculty says: “I bring you the wonderful news that Nimi Wariboko was elected to be a member of the American Theological Society. This is a high honor, as the Society has an esteemed reputation, dating back to 1912.”
Wariboko was elected at its March 24, 2018 meeting at Princeton, New Jersey. He is well-known for his contributions to economic ethics, social ethics, philosophical theology, Pentecostal studies, and African studies. He is the author of over 20 books, including The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory (2018), Economics in Spirit and Truth: A Moral Philosophy of Finance (2014), The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit (2012), Ethics and Time: Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion of the Niger Delta (2010), and God and Money: A Theology of Money in a Globalizing World (2008).
This highly select group of scholars in theological inquiry has many world-famous scholars as its past presidents. They include Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Douglas Clyde Macintosh, John Baillie, Wilhelm Pauck, and Robert C. Neville. Many of its past and current members have also given the Gifford lectures (what scholars in theology, ethics, and philosophy consider as their own version of the Nobel Prize). Gifford lecturers are recognized as the preeminent thinkers in their various fields. According to the Gifford Lectureship website, among the many gifted lecturers are Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Stanley Hauerwas, William James, Jean-Luc Marion, Iris Murdoch, Roger Scruton, Eleonore Stump, Charles Taylor, Alfred North Whitehead, and Rowan Williams.
I am proud of Professor Wariboko for his election into this small body confined to experts and preeminent thinkers in theology and philosophy. He is the third African to be elected to this distinguished body. The first African is a white South African, Professor Wentzel van Huyssteen of Princeton Theological Seminary who was elected into the Society in 2000 and gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 2004.
In my usual way of provoking intellectual discussions among scholarly friends I asked Professor Wariboko this question: Now that the theological establishment has invited you to sit at the “big man’s table” and dine luxuriously with the top wigs, what do you intend to do with your liberatory, radical, and subversive scholarship on social ethics? Not long ago, you were also honored with a very prestigious endowed chair in ethics in this country. Have you joined them or come into your Paradise?
This is his response: There are always, at least, seven options anytime a scholar from the margins of the world is invited to the big house, the master’s table. Option one is what you have just laid out: enjoy the masters’ delicacies and wine and adopt their tools of the trade. This is not my option. The second option is the Daniel Option. Like Daniel in the Bible the scholar from the margin can purposed in her heart not to “defile” herself with the king’s delicacies. She can figuratively go on a fast or live on vegetables and water amid the temptations of the masters’ cuisine.
The third option is from Saint Paul. Here I mean the as-if-not stance of Paul in I Cor. 7: 20, 29-31. Paul says in this passage that the true believer should participate in the affairs of this world through an attitude of suspension, with some distance. “Those who weep as though they did not weep, those who rejoice as though they did not rejoice.” Fourth, we have the Mark-Taylor option. Taylor was my teacher at Princeton. He would advise the scholar from the margins to go into the room and overturn the table of delicacies as Jesus did in the temple.
There is also the option I will name after the Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin. In his first thesis on the philosophy of history he says that historical materialism will win all the time if it learns to have theology as the wizened dwarf hidden away and administering its operational and intellectual machinery. (This option might also be called the biblical Esther option.) The scholar from the margin can always hide under the table and secretly direct the affairs of the masters. The sixth is the Fela-Kuti option. Once Fela bought a Mercedes Benz car, the status symbol of the rich in Nigeria at the day and used it to carry rubbish in Lagos. Fela was not necessarily abolishing the status symbol, but he took what was “sacred” from an exclusive sphere, (temporarily) emancipated it from its connections to status and affluence and turned it to common use. In this same style, the scholar from the margin can “profane” the intellectual delicacies of the masters’ table, “deactivate” them and put them into new possible radical uses—perhaps, permanently.
Finally, we have the Moremi option from Yoruba history and legend. A person uses her gifts to save her people. The scholar from the margins pays the sacrifice of hard work and she is admitted into the secret chambers of the masters from which she can learn much about the hegemonic ideas of the masters’ house so as defeat or defang the overlords for the benefit of her people. Which of these options or a combination of them is the best for us?
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