DESCRIPTION:

Interview with Rev. James Woodall, President, Georgia State Chapter of the NAACP and doctoral student in the Morehouse School of Religion at the Interdenominational Theological Center. 

The Reverend Doctor Melissa Sexton is a post-doctoral fellow in the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church.  Dr. Sexton is completing a practicum with the Interfaith Health Program as part of her fellowship; as part of that work, she is interviewing those with particular insights into the religious and spiritual dimensions of the COVID-19 outbreak and our responses to it.  

At the start of the interview Rev. Woodall reflects on the meaning of “I can’t breathe” in the COVID-19 pandemic.  He begins by placing those words in the historical event of Eric Garner’s 2014 arrest in which he struggles to breathe as police officers hold him down.  Mr. Garner died while in custody following this arrest.  James situates this event and its importance for Black people and communities in the US in light of Biblical understandings of “breath” and their theological significance.  Tying these concepts together, James discusses the ways in which social-structural systems constrict our breath and the breath of God.  

James connects this dilemma to the demands of justice that faith calls us to strive for.  The only way to meet this demand is through the power bestowed by the breath of God.  In exploring this idea, Melissa asks James what this call looks like for white Christians. James offers his perspectives on the cultural forces that constitute racism, arguing that the key question is not “what can white people do, but how can we destroy white supremacy as it has been internalized by all of us.”  

The conversation then ends with a long and provocative discussion of theodicy—how to understand the nature of God in light of human suffering.  James argues that the reality of suffering demands that we have to re-negotiate what the claims of our faith must be if we are to actually find God in the midst of crisis.  The struggle to be honest in the face of this suffering is to ask hard, honest questions about where God.  Asking this question reflects Jesus’ own struggles in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before his death as he asked: my God, my God—where in the hell are you?  Asking this question faithfully calls us to reject false Gods and to understand the nature of God in new ways.