Thandeka (minister)

Thandeka (born Sue Booker on March 25, 1946[1][2]) is a Unitarian Universalist minister, an important figure in American liberal theology,[3] and the creator of a contemporary form of affect theology,[4] which grounds religious knowing in human feeling.[4] Thandeka's affect theology combines concepts from nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher with insights from affective neuroscience.[5] Thandeka also theorizes that shame plays a central role in the construction of white racial identity.

Thandeka’s theological work focuses on the role of feeling or emotion in human religious experience and is grounded in engagement with Schleiermacher. Her first book The Embodied Self was based on a close reading of Schleiermacher’s Dialectic, focusing on his idea that feeling is primary in human experience, and exploring how feeling connects mind and body,[3] or thinking and organic being.[6] Thandeka has gone on to consider the religious significance of neuroscientific understandings of emotions,[3] especially those of Jaak Panksepp.[7] Thandeka’s affect theology centers affective consciousness, as opposed to belief, in religious experience.[8] She is critical of contemporary Protestantism that does not focus on creating an experience of love for people.[7]

Thandeka also takes an affective approach to understanding white racial identity and anti-racism work. She considers the concepts of racism and white privilege to be no longer useful.[9] Instead, she takes a different view of the psychology of white identity, showing how shame and shaming are central to its construction.[10] This shame is damaging to white people, resulting in the suppression of self and negative effects on whites’ abilities to be “relational beings.”[11] While Thandeka is hopeful that insights into this will help white people heal and change, others disagree.[12][9] In 1999, Thandeka criticized the anti-racism program adopted by the Unitarian Universalist Association.[13] Her program for congregational spiritual revitalization includes efforts to address racial and economic problems.[14]

Thandeka's books include Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness (2018), Learning to be White: Money, Race, and God in America (1999), and The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Solution to Kant's Problem of the Empirical Self (1995).[15] The Embodied Self takes a fresh look at F. D. E. Schleiermacher's notoriously difficult Dialektik.[6] Historian David Roediger characterizes Learning to be White as "indispensable".[16] Her essays have appeared in The Oxford University Handbook on Feminist Theology and Globalization (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher (2005).[15]

Thandeka is a former television producer and an Emmy award winner.[17] She studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University, then went on to earn an M.A. in history of religions at UCLA.[2] She earned a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in 1988.[3] She has taught at San Francisco State University, Williams College, Meadville Lombard Theological School, Harvard Divinity School, Lancaster Seminary, and Brandeis University.[2] Born Sue Booker, Thandeka received her name from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984; it means "beloved" or "one who is loved by God" in Xhosa.[3][15]