










































Returning to the Archive


13

Returning to the Archive
Re-imagining The Tower of Babel and 
Pentecost
Walter Earl Fluker, Dean’s Professor of Spirituality, Ethics, and Leadership, 
Candler School of Theology, Emory University

[Pentecost] encapsulates the notion that no finite or conditioned reality 
can claim to have reached its destiny. The movement of every existent to 
its destiny (full realization of its potentialities) remains forever incomplet-
able because it remains “rooted” in the abyss of divine freedom. Every end 
has only one option: to be a new beginning.

—Nimi Wariboko, The Pentecostal Principle (2012, 1)

THE ARCHIVE AS SANCTUARY

I am incurably religious — not superstitious and self-righteous — but 
religiously curious and compulsively committed to understanding 
what “truths” might be dis-covered in the study of religious tradi-
tions and experiences. Therefore, it is no accident that most of my 
scholarship has been devoted in some form or the other to Howard 
Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the noble traditions that 
formed and inspired them. The fact is that while my scholarship has 
sought to maintain the highest standards of rational and analytic in-
tegrity and protocol, there is an element of awe and a sense of call-
ing to these figures and movements of people in African American 
religious and moral traditions that have brought me again and again 
to the Archive. 

PLENARY



14  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

It is precisely because I am religious that I need also to begin with 
a confession. I am compelled to share a secret that I have kept close 
until now, that is, in my vocation of learning, editing, transcribing, 
publishing, and recording for posterity, the Archive is my sanctuary. 
It is the space where I return again and again in search of the arkhé, 
“the beginning.” It was Jacques Derrida who called this force of habit, 
“archive fever.” He describes it in this manner, “It is to have a com-
pulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepress-
ible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for re-
turn to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (Derrida 
2017, 1; italics added).  In other words, as we return to the Archive 
(the beginning), I am also commencing, beginning again. We are all 
involved in and indicted by what James Baldwin called, this endless 
struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity (1993, 98).

As a graduate student at Boston University, and even now, when 
I enter the Gotlieb Archival Research Center, this sense of religious-
ness — homesickness, nostalgia, irrepressible desire— visits me in 
memories of librarians, information providers, scholars, activists, 
colleagues and so many others who have been my guides into this sa-
cred space of knowing, believing and contemplation. I remember well 
sitting for nearly eight years (1980–1988) in the major research area 
of the Center, a long rectangular room with tables, white gloves and 
original manuscripts, photographs and other artifacts from the King 
and Thurman collections. It is a site of memory; and “memory,” writes 
William Faulkner, “believes before knowing remembers. Believes lon-
ger than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders” (1990, 119). 

Even today when I enter the room, I am immediately drawn to 
the huge portrait on the back wall of the archangel Uriel, depicted 
as a battle-ready sentry guarding heaven’s gates. The piece is en-
titled, “Uriel Standing in the Sun” by the early nineteenth-century 
American history painter Washington Allston (1779–1843), a friend 
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Benjamin 
Haydon. Allston’s painting is a chromatically brilliant vision of the 
archangel guarding heaven against Satanic revolt. Inspired by Mil-
ton’s Paradise Lost, it seems almost real. Uriel is the most mysterious 
of the archangels; unlike Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, he eludes 
clear definition. Over the centuries, he is depicted in various ways as 
protector and guardian. One tradition speaks of him as the archan-
gel who illuminates our minds with information, ideas, epiphanies, 
and insights. Other traditions associate him with Metatron, an arch-



PLENARy  15

angel known in Hebrew religious traditions as the Recording Angel 
or the Scribe of Heaven. I often identify him as “the Angel with the 
Flaming Sword” set outside Eden to insure that imposters do not un-
scrupulously return to the garden (the arkhé, the beginning); rather, 
entry is only permitted for the true in heart who are willing to be cut 
asunder and dismembered by his burning sword, the price exacted 
for knowledge, in sum, for return to the beginning, the Archive.1 We 
are ways commencing, beginning again. 

This latter description of Uriel best describes my relationship with 
this powerful symbol that sits guard over the Archive and my long-
ing to return to what is closest to the beginning and perhaps to get 
a glimpse of treasures lost, forgotten, and mis-remembered. If Der-
rida is correct, it is in this sense that archeology trumps the archive 
by recovering the original artifact; it is when “the arkhē appears in 
the nude, without the archive” (2017, 91). Primary documents don’t 
lie, although they may contain lies, or sometimes they don’t tell the 
whole truth, or they illumine “truths” in different ways; they can be 
elusive and open to different perspectives. In these documents you 
see varnished “truths” that puzzle, befuddle, and send us back again 
into unknown territory with incomplete maps of histories, empires, 
civilizations, and everyday peoples lost to memory. There are spins, 
turns, biases, subjective interpretations that are illumined in our 
quests for knowledge, meaning and hopefully, patterns of human 
enterprise that help us better understand who we are and what we 
are called to be and do in the present. One cannot be a historian, a 
decent religious scholar or theologian without immersing oneself in 
primary documents, spending unhurried hours in archives. I think 
all of us who serve at the behest of the law and authority of the Li-
brary and Archive are really, at heart, archeologists of knowledge; 
and curators of materials that are given for reinterpretation of mean-
ing, signs, symbols, memories, and values.

It is within this context of Atla’s mission “to promote worldwide 
scholarly communication in religion and theology by advancing the 
work of libraries and related information providers” that I am hon-
ored to share in this year’s annual meeting. I applaud your impor-
tant work with networks of institutions and individuals committed 
to returning to the Archive for generations past and those yet to be 
born. This is not only important work, but it is also absolutely essen-
tial for our missions as we enter the third decade of this century. We 
are guardians, protectors, archeologists, and curators of the Archive.



16  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

WHO, NOW, WILL SHAPE THE MEANING OF AMERICA?

Your work is so important because in each epoch of human construc-
tions of civilization, we must pay close attention to context where 
change is constant and calls forth new meanings and configurations 
of history and memory. It is a vocation that demands more that tech-
nical skills and competencies, but the most authentic sense of who 
we are and how we respond to new moments in our individual and 
collective lives to social historical narratives that meet us at the in-
tersections of worlds colliding. 

We are all aware of the circling processes of social change that 
are sweeping across the globe like whirlwinds of fire.2 (The fire is 
burning, and the wind is blowing). Something is happening in our 
world that we are not quite able to name. Whether it is manifested 
in Ukraine, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Paris, 
Palestine, Israel, Russia, India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Korea, 
India, China, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, or the United States 
of America—we know that there is something on the horizon that is 
larger than our own particular histories and memories: indeed, the 
ground has shifted! The ways we have thought about power, sover-
eignty, geopolitical territorialism, business, communication, the envi-
ronment, values, culture, religion, and theology are changing as well.

Here within the United States of America, there are some ominous 
signs on the horizon: rapid vigilantism, gun violence, increased inci-
dences of mental illness, a resurgence and re-visitation of an old and 
ugly ghost that haunts the American House that race built. This old 
ghost shows up everywhere in the banning of books, authoritarian 
campaigns of anti-trans, anti-choice, anti-immigration, disinforma-
tion — reconstructing and reconfiguring the Archive! We have be-
come a veritable American Tower of Babel.  

As we deal with the anxiety, anguish, and turmoil associated with 
our national reckoning with the authority and power of the Archive, 
I would like to ask the question differently, as it was raised by the late 
neoconservative clergyman Richard John Neuhaus nearly forty years 
ago, “Who, now, will shape the meaning of America?”3 Neuhaus is an 
odd choice for raising this question, because his interrogative had 
more to do with his own fear that the religious public square was be-
ing overtaken by secular liberalism which imperiled democratic free-
doms. He thought it was necessary and possible to hold classical lib-
eral political ideals in tension with religious faith—that discussion is 
still alive and relevant. Neuhaus suggested that Catholics, Lutherans, 



PLENARy  17

and evangelicals were viable candidates for “re-articulating a deeper 
tradition of American political thought” (Rose 2016). Underlying his 
public rhetoric was a strong indictment of what he saw as a scattering 
of basic American values that were being hijacked by Jerry Falwell 
and others of the Righteous Right — a drama that continues to this day. 

A decade after Neuhaus’s declaration, the late historian, Arthur 
Schlesinger, arguably one of the most devout liberals of his era, 
wrote a stunning short essay, The Disuniting of America: Reflections 
on a Multicultural Society (1998). He likewise suggested that there 
was an unsettling public conversation in the land of the free and 
the home of the brave. He described the situation as the “disunit-
ing of America.” His reflections on a multi-cultural society warned 
of what he perceived as a threat to national identity and cherished 
customs. He wrote:

The national ideal had once been e pluribus unum. Are we now to belittle 
unum and glorify pluribus? Will the center hold? or will the melting pot yield 
to the Tower of Babel? (Schlesinger 1998, 22)

Will the center hold, or should we or can we have more than one 
center or should we do away with centers altogether? Are we now 
an American Tower of Babel? Thirty years later, there is a revival of 
conservative Christian nationalist resistance movements that are 
pushing back on the gains of earlier progressive movements that 
will continue to be a part of the debate on religious and theological 
education in this nation and throughout the world. These move-
ments are calling for a return to a glorious American past of family 
values and sexual purity that never really existed. Camouflaged in 
the language of religious freedom, fears of socialism, and second 
amendment rights, some are calling for a “Benedict option” and the 
reconstitution of an old story of individual rights based on white su-
premacist logic and the dismantling of the fragile gains of diversity, 
inclusion, and equity (Dreher 2018). Thus, I am asking Neuhaus’s 
question again today as we stand at intersections where worlds are 
colliding, “Who, now, will shape the meaning, not only of America, 
but of the world?” As a way of reflecting on this question, I think that 
more than ever we need to return to the story of the Tower of Babel.

THE AMERICAN TOWER OF BABEL

The Story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11) is well known. Biblical 
commentators have tended to treat it as “a mythical or legendary 



18  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

account of the breaking up of the [premodern] unity of humankind 
into separate communities, distinguished and isolated by differences 
of language … The story reflects … the impression made on Semitic 
nomads by the imposing monuments of Babylonian civilization” 
(Skinner 1910, 223).4 The story of Babel also serves as a prologue, 
an introduction to the story of Abraham and Sarah who represent 
the new faithfulness required by God in the extension of the human 
family — a family through which God will correct the damage of Ba-
bel and bless the nations of the earth. The Story of Babel ends with 
the scattering of the builders of the Tower; and immediately we are 
taken to the story of Abraham and Sarah who are also part of God’s 
scattering of the seed (Gen. 12:1–3; Gen. 13:14–17).

Why does God scatter the builders? Howard Thurman offers some 
insight into this enigma:

The judgment of God appears again and again in the process of history, 
dramatized by the rise and fall of peoples who have neglected to build their 
civilizations towards the higher ends of ethical responsibility … the diaboli-
cal character of the enterprise itself destroys the vehicle so that finally the 
energies are scattered and dissipated. (Thurman 1948, 230)

The editors of the story play on the Hebrew word, balal, which 
means to “mix” or “confuse.”  In this respect, this ancient Hebrew 
story of the building of the city and the tower is an act of signifyin’ 
against Babylon, their oppressor. The legend explains for them why 
Babylon fell; it is an explanation of the destruction of this oppres-
sive civilization whose arrogance (superbia) was interrupted by 
God’s righteousness. The oppressed always find a way to signify on 
their oppressors.

THE TOWER AND BABEL AS NATIONAL IMAGINARY

The Tower of Babel has a long and uneven reception history of “imag-
ined communities” that involve the constitution of national identities 
through the promotion of certain meanings and the subordination 
of other meanings and social groups within the nation-state.5 Schol-
ars like Anthony Smith and Tristan Major argue that the core of the 
Babel Story is “ethnicity” which resides in “myths, memories, values 
and symbols” (Major 2021, 10).

The Tower of Babel narrative is preceded by The Table of Nations, 
a tripartite division of the origins of nations of the world after the 
Flood (Gen. 10). Noah’s three sons, Japheth, Shem, and Ham, repre-



PLENARy  19

sent the new beginning after the Flood. Over the centuries, Shem’s 
lineage came to correspond with Asia; Ham’s with Libya or Africa; 
and Japheth’s with Europe. Roman ethnocentrism from the fourth 
century CE encouraged and continued this discrimination against 
non-European peoples. This tripartite configuration of nations was 
cemented by the fifth century as well as the moral and theological 
perceptions of each grouping. In other words, “ethnocentricity of 
European, and later Christian, superiority, inherited from classical 
ethnography, were appropriated, and re-enforced by the interpreta-
tions of Genesis 10–11” (Major 2021, 19).6

I would like to suggest The Tower of Babel is an inherited set of 
symbols, signs and metaphors that operates as a part of a “national 
imaginary” that communicates to its adherents an assault on their 
meaning, essence, and identity. An imaginary is a socially constructed 
reality that serves as the basis for social and cultural cohesion and 
identity. Thus, the imaginary of The American Tower of Babel has 
insinuated itself into the very fiber of American consciousness, signi-
fying who is in and who is out—the sons and daughters of Shem and 
Ham are perennial outsiders, never quite allowed to participate in the 
rewards and blessings of the empire, unless they can become “white.” 

BECOMING AND ACTING “WHITE”

In The Ground Has Shifted (2016), I tell the story of how I learned 
to “act White.” My academic performance in high school was very 
poor. In fact, I am sure I was in the last quadrant of the 1969 graduat-
ing class of Dunbar Vocational High School in Chicago. Yet, I enjoyed 
writing and during the end of my senior year, my homeroom teacher 
found an internship for me in a downtown advertising agency. Ev-
eryone in the agency except me, of course, was White and suburban. 
It was my introduction to the professional and socially constructed 
White world in which I experienced the latent characteristics of what 
Thandeka (1999) describes as “learning to be white.” It took a major 
adjustment (and some more adjustment), but after several months, I 
learned “to be White.” What an incredible power it conferred upon me 
as I learned what to say to the secretaries to make them and me feel 
comfortable as I entered the office; or how to speak to the white men 
about baseball at the coffee station and so on. I wore the mask, better, 
over time the mask wore me. But as I learned the power and danger 
of the mask. I learned to adjust it to various situations! So much was 



20  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

involved in my performance—affections, speech, mannerisms, and 
dress—that I learned to consciously change my habits and practices 
to accommodate this new environment where everyone was watch-
ing. I mention this year-long episode to suggest that there was never a 
moment when I forgot that I was Black (nor did they), but as long as I 
was acting and talking “White” there was little or no tension. Indeed, 
there was a lot of paternalism and unmistakable racism, but in my 
shape-shifting Rodney King fantasia, we all got along. I identified as 
“White” in my shamed-racialized-underclass-Black-male-body, but I 
was never White, and neither were they. We were playing parts imput-
ed to us from a larger socio-political, historical dramatic imaginary.

 It was not until I was drafted into the US Army and became a born-
again evangelical through the Navigators Ministries that I was able to 
overcome this inherited script of being “White in Black skin.” Sadly, 
even this conversion did not wipe away my s(k)in and my inner tor-
ment; nor did it get my name written in the book of life. I always felt 
strange, disoriented, and not-at-home in my body. It was not until 
I returned to the old hood from the army and tried to “save” one of 
my buddies that I realized that I had not escaped the lake of fire. He 
resisted and stated, “Damn, man, you don’ turned white!” Yes, that’s 
right, I had turned into someone else and was looking self-assured 
and talking like the Fuller Cosmetics man—I had become a witness! 
I often remark that I was a “White evangelical” until I got saved—af-
ter I figured out that the second death, where the beast and the false 
prophets are, is the domain that James Baldwin called “being white 
and other lies” (Baldwin, 1984). 

In our context, we clearly see the ways in which national identity 
as imaginary refers to our personal identities and fidelity to the un-
fulfilled promise of equality that Benedict Anderson calls “ghostly na-
tional imaginings” (quoted in Holland 2000, 22). These are imaginings 
enshrouded in death and anonymity like the quasi-religious response 
that we offer at the tombs of unknown soldiers — a universal tran-
scendental, like “the melting pot,” that everyone can believe in with-
out attending to the complex historical and social realities of religious, 
ethnic, and racial centrism, death, social misery and displacement.

THEOLOGICAL DISPLACEMENT OF THE BODY

This theological displacement, being alienated from one’s body, land, 
and history, according to Willie James Jennings, began as a “theo-



PLENARy  21

logical error” in the Christian imagination as early as the fifteenth 
century during the European colonization of “nonwhite peoples.” 
Salvation, therefore, for Black and other nonwhite people, was sche-
matized on a grand scale of election in which whiteness represents 
“high salvific possibility, rooted in the signs of movement towards 
God (for example, cleanliness, intelligence, obedience, social hierar-
chy, and advancement in civilization).” But Black bodies, along with 
Jews and Moors, were relegated to the lowest region of salvific pos-
sibility, because “Black indicates doubt, uncertainty and opacity of 
saving effects” (Jennings 2011, 35–36).

Before the sophisticated, analytic probing of contemporary Black 
theologians like Jennings, Howard Thurman in his classic work, Jesus 
and the Disinherited (1996), demonstrated how theological presup-
positions were linked to ocular metaphors that served as cultural 
resources in the segregation of African Americans. At the heart of 
the following quote is Thurman’s critical observation that relates 
cultural aesthetics to religion, morality, and law: 

Given segregation as a factor determining relations, the resources of the 
environment are made into instruments to enforce the artificial position. 
Most of the accepted social behavior-patterns assume segregation to be 
normal — if normal then, correct; if correct, then moral; if moral, then re-
ligious. Religion is thus made a defender and guarantor of the presump-
tions. God, for all practical purposes, is imaged as an elderly, benign white 
man, seated on a white throne, with bright, white light emanating from his 
countenance. Angels are blonds and brunets suspended in the air around 
his throne to be his messengers and execute his purposes. Satan is viewed 
as being red with the glow of fire. But the imps, the messengers of the devil, 
are black. The phrase “black as an imp” is a stereotype. The implications of 
such a view are simply fantastic in the intensity of their tragedy. Doomed 
on earth to a fixed and unremitting status of inferiority, of which segrega-
tion is symbolic, and at the same time cut off from the hope that the Cre-
ator intended it otherwise, those who are thus victimized are stripped of 
all social protection. It is vicious and thoroughly despicable to rationalize 
this position, the product of a fear that is as sordid as it is unscrupulous, 
into acceptance. Under such circumstances there is but a step from being 
despised to despising oneself. (Thurman 1996, 43–44) 

EUROPE AND THE IMAGINARY TOWER OF BABEL

There is another step. We cannot begin the process of undoing the 
damage of the American Tower of Babel until we demystify the trans-
national imaginary of Europe. England, America’s mother country 



22  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

that sits at the heart of many cultures, many languages, many faces 
of otherness, all extracted from a world empire that nervously ne-
gotiates its place in this geographical and imaginary space called 
Europe, has much to teach us about Babel.  

Outside the south door of York Minster Cathedral, in Yorkshire, 
there is a statue of a seated man. He looks pensively at the sword he 
holds, point down, in his left hand. The tip has broken off. The sword 
has become a cross. The man represented is Flavius Valerius Aure-
lius Constantinus, who on July 25, 306 CE, was declared Emperor of 
Rome within a few yards of his modern statue. He symbolizes the 
conversion of Rome to Christianity, the man who would be declared 
both a saint and a god after his death. On the base of the statue are 
the words “Constantine. By this sign conquer”.7 This is one of the 
defining moments in the history of Western civilization: the vision 
that led Constantine to victory at the battle of Saxa Rubra, when his 
forces defeated those of one of his rival emperors, Maxentius. This 
in turn led to Constantine’s acceptance of Christianity and his impo-
sition of it on the whole Roman Empire (Vinzent 2023).

It appears that the Church has been the harbinger of empire 
since, and Europe, of course, has been its center. Eurocentrism is 
about more than the rise of the Enlightenment as age of rationalism 
and its conjunct twin, necessity. Rather, Europe is also a religious 
idea, a mythology, an imaginary place founded on the conquest of 
other civilizations. My friend Cornel West is correct when calls for 
the “demystification of the idea of Europe” as a first step in critical 
multicultural discourse. He says, “… the only way to get beyond a 
paralyzing either/or perspective is to take a look at this idea of Eu-
rope, the very idea of Europe as an ideological construct” (West and 
Brown 1993, S148).8 

Willie Jennings has identified the re-narrating of the Christian 
doctrine of creation as an urgent and critical work of contemporary 
scholars who are concerned with the insidious ways racial ontol-
ogy both confers and wheedles itself into nationalistic and cultural 
imaginaries. He suggests that in the hegemonic project of colonial-
ism, Europeans “performed a deeply theological act that mirrored 
the identity and action of God in creating” (Jennings 2011, 60). In as-
suming the role of a divine creative council, they not only defined 
and subjugated races, but also transitioned and reconfigured land 
and territory as part of the domain of the project of whiteness. He 
argues, “Theorists and theories of race will not touch the ground until 



PLENARy  23

they reckon with the foundations of racial imaginings in the deploy-
ment of an altered theological vision of creation. We must narrate not 
only the alteration of bodies, but of space itself” (Jennings 2011, 63) 

Like all declining civilizations, Europe built a great tower to the 
heavens. Perhaps the Builders of Babel err not because they try to 
reach the heavens, but because they neglect the weightier role of ethi-
cal responsibility to many diverse peoples, animals, water, and plants 
that make up this breathing planet. My point, however, is not to isolate 
Europe as a geographical territory, but as idea, as myth come-to-life 
and sanctioned by the power of religion, by Christianity. Historical 
analysis of the idea of Europe can demystify Europe and create a 
new starting point for the conversation on diversity, pluralism, and 
multiculturalism. By performing a critical analysis of multicultur-
alism that interrogates hegemonic elision of the idea of Europe, we 
expose Eurocentrism as a false idea.  

This is the kind of critical curating that has the potential to shift 
the reformist paradigm that currently surrounds the debate on diver-
sity more critical and expansive; one that honors diversity, plurality, 
and harmonic possibilities not just of race, class, gender and the usu-
al candidates, but of religion itself. Again, as protectors, guardians, 
archeologists, and curators of the Archive, Atla’s mission reaches 
back into our past and calls us forward to a new moment—to begin 
again in the Archive. It is our task to secure its treasures, but as cura-
tors we must also wake up the dead, i.e., to wake up subjectivity and 
to examine its relation to an imaginary national identity. In respect 
to subjectivity, I am concerned with notions of identity, agency, oth-
erness, and human flourishing. How do we understand our roles in 
celebrating creativity, diversity, inclusion, and equity? [We are actors 
on a stage with scripts and languages that have been given to us to 
perform]. So, how do we wake up and “undo the damage of Babel”?

UNDOING THE DAMAGE OF BABEL: PENTECOST RE-IMAGINED

The story of Babel is a story about the concentration of power through 
the facility of language and speech—communication.9 Scholars have 
also made a connection between the well-known stories of the Tow-
er of Babel and Pentecost (the festival of the harvest). But even the 
typology of Babel and Pentecost has perpetuated the supremacy of 
Christian faith and the role of empire since Augustine (354–430 CE) 
and Pope Gregory the Great (540–604 CE). The idea of “unity in diver-



24  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

sity” is universalized under the theological principle of “one Lord, 
one faith and one baptism” (Major 2021, 71–72).

So, what might a reimagined Pentecostal symbol look like in the 
twenty-first century? How might it speak to the many languages, the 
many nations, the many religions, the many tongues spoken by those 
who have had to live under the colonizing power of the European he-
gemonic trope of “unity in diversity”? What are the implications for 
the redefinition of the distribution of certain shares or spaces among 
certain groups whom Jacque Rancière calls “that of the part of those 
who have no part” (Rancière 1999, 29-30; see also Jacobs 2015). Here 
the work of Nimi Wariboko, Keri Day, and others provide some clues 
(Day 2022; Wariboko 2012). Wariboko suggests that 

[Pentecost] encapsulates the notion that no finite or conditioned reality 
can claim to have reached its destiny. The movement of every existent to its 
destiny (full realization of its potentialities) remains forever incompletable 
because it remains “rooted” in the abyss of divine freedom. Every end has 
only one option: to be a new beginning. (Wariboko 2012, 1).

For Keri Day, Pentecost re-imagined is situated in a “democracy to 
come”, an “advent’, (“return” and “commencement”); not “the linear, 
evolutionary, progressive process in which democracy is destined 
to a more perfect way within history”, but rather by peoples “who 
through their practices and deliberations, are willing to become 
steadily democratized, that is, to become humanized by encountering 
others” (Day 2022, 152-153). In other words, Pentecost does not end 
with the apostles of the early church; rather it symbolizes a new be-
ginning in every epoch and every time when those who have no part 
dare to speak. Can the subaltern speak? Yes! (Spivak 1988; Morris 
2010) We know from recent movements like pro-choice, Black Lives 
Matter, Pan-Asian Movements, LatinX Movements, LBGTQ Move-
ments and Say Her Name, that these bodies dare to speak, break, 
shift, and redefine the spaces they have been assigned in “the house 
that race built” (Lubiano, 1998). And it is precisely because they dare 
to speak that they reveal the process of equality because only a free 
human can speak (Rancière 1999, 29–30; see also Fluker, 2018).

Normally the “tongues of fire” symbolism is interpreted primarily 
as a blessing upon the people at Pentecost, but Blaine Charette argues 
that the symbol of “tongues of fire” is also “divine judgment upon the 
disobedient” (Charette 2005, 173).10 Pentecost is harvest time, when 
all things come together for the next scattering, because the Lord of 
the harvest is always scattering seeds, collecting them, and making 



PLENARy  25

ready for harvest where the wheat and chaff are separated and the 
latter is thrown into the fire. 

A reimagined vision of Pentecost, from this perspective, is a sym-
bol or a sign that points the liberating power of languages and free 
speech that promote the Divine’s will for just and ennobling voices 
as diverse as creation. The erasure of history through the banning 
of books in our schools and libraries are blatant examples of this vi-
cious assault to create one language. We hear the chants and screams 
of “Let’s make America great again!” I am so afraid, my friends, that 
this campaign for a nostalgic American past that never truly existed 
is the language of the desperate and derelict builders of the American 
Tower of Babel! Greatness is conditional. On August 28, 1963, Rev. Dr. 
Martin Luther King Jr. shared his Pentecostal vision of what it would 
mean for America to be a great nation. His dream, he declared, was 
“deeply rooted in the American dream. One day this nation will rise 
up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths 
to be self-evident: that all men [sic] are created equal.’” Yet, he added 
the most important condition for the realization of this dream. He 
said, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent 
words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, 
they were signing a promissory note to which every American was 
to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men [sic] — yes, Black 
men [sic] as well as white men [sic] — would be guaranteed the 
unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” He 
added, “If America is to be a great nation,” King emphasized, “this 
must be true.” 

NEW BEGINNINGS: CURATING THE ARCHIVE

The Pentecost Story is not just a story of speaking in tongues—it is a 
story of diversity, inclusion, equity, belonging and the broadening 
vision of the community. It is an old story. It is a story of new begin-
nings, of return to the Archive. Pentecost and prophecy go hand in 
hand. Whenever the Spirit of Pentecost is among the people, the 
Wind blows, the Fire burns, and they prophesy! And whenever we 
prophesy, things change. 

It is a dangerous story. It is a story that will make some people 
uneasy, especially those who are content to see “business as usual” 
in America, in the ravaged countries of Africa, in Latin America, in 
Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in the core of our nation’s inner 



26  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

cities, and in our religious communities. But if we are to be true to 
this story, then it is important that we understand that Pentecost is 
not for sentimentalists and “pop patriots.” It is not an isolated episode 
in the chronicles of American history; rather it is the power to con-
tinue the struggle against racism, sexism, cis-genderism, economic 
injustice, and all forms of oppression that eat away at the heart of our 
body politic like an insidious cancer. It is a call for “new beginnings.” 
It is a call for a new vanguard of visionaries who are willing to go into 
the “no-trespassing zones” of this world system and to declare boldly 
and courageously that the future of our communities, our nation, 
and indeed the world, hinges on spiritual and moral foundations.

To accept the radical implications of a re-imagined Pentecost 
means that we can no longer feign ignorance and invisibility regard-
ing the political and economic scenarios that determine our corpo-
rate destiny. A new world is being born. All around us there is evi-
dence that a changing of the guard is taking place. In Africa, in Latin 
America, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in Russia, Ukraine, 
and within the context of American society significant changes are 
taking place that are having far-reaching effects on the way we do 
business—the ways in which we “promote worldwide scholarly 
communication in religion and theology by advancing the work of 
libraries and related information providers.” Business cannot go on 
as usual. We must make new beginnings.

For organizations like Atla, I recommend returning to the Archive 
as a spiraling community of discourse and practice with emphasis 
on re-curating or re-imagining the curatorial processes of identify-
ing “the gaps” in history and memory and initiating and sustaining 
democratic spaces along the lines that Keri Day suggests above. Such 
processes will need to take seriously issues of authoritorial practic-
es that begin with listening, looking, and learning from others who 
have been erased, excluded, and penalized through the vicious and 
eviscerating conquests of The American Tower of Babel; and reimag-
ining what a Pentecostal flourishing of other cultures, languages 
and worlds of meaning-making might look like in your midst. These 
communities will engage in re-membering, re-telling and re-living 
narratives of nationalistic and cultural imaginaries, as Jennings ad-
dresses above. While space does not allow for a thorough discussion 
of this re-imagining, I suggest a three-fold performance of bricolage, 
i.e., beginning with what is at hand, what history and memory pres-



PLENARy  27

ents to us in this ambiguous and contingent present. As bricoleurs, 
we must create and cultivate democratic spaces in the Archive. 

This three-fold movement involves congregating, conjuring, and 
conspiring in common (s) that I explored in The Ground Has Shifted 
(2016, 169–196). Congregating (congregare) — gathering, binding, 
and coming together — involves repenting by rethinking, regretting, 
running away from the old ghosts, and running to new imagined fu-
tures by acknowledging and receiving the voices and visions of the 
new movements of the Spirit in our midst. Secondly, re-curating is 
akin to conjuring, the imaginative art of taking the materials at hand, 
that which experience gives us, and imaginatively refashioning them 
into creative tools for curating the Archive. This is what it means to 
conspire—to engage in a type of “spiritual bricolage,” a process of in-
clusion, exclusion, and reconfiguration of experience and language 
through an institutional commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity 
and belonging which becomes incarnate in public speech and action.

Finally, this approach is closer to a third way between essential-
ism and postmodern critiques. This does not mean that we ignore 
the analytical procedures and problems associated with modernist 
protocols of identity and agency; rather, the suggestion offers an 
opportunity to search for common(s) or temporary, experimental 
strategies that allow spaces for consideration of the questions of tool-
making and the revisability of subjugating discourses in an ongoing, 
unfinished communicative project. This perspective has its merits 
with respect to a “practical universality,” that is, a quest for “unity in 
diversity” that is appreciative of the materiality of race, ethnicity and 
other forms of “othering” but does not inscribe ontological status to 
them; rather, it is in part a project fueled by communicative reason 
that points to, but is always under the scrutiny of, democratic eyes. 
The emphasis in such a democratic, communicative process is on 
continuing the conversation, not necessarily on finding the “right” 
answer(s) but engaging in pragmatic approaches that seek common 
understandings and solutions to questions of identity, otherness, and 
human and nonhuman flourishing that are not fixed, monocausal, 
and monolithic. In this respect, honoring, testing, listening to, argu-
ing for, and producing multiple identifications created in a rhizom-
atic third space are the result of a long, arduous struggle to be and 
become — devenir (Deleuz and Guatarri 2004, 21; see also Barthes 
1990; Butler 1999, 2009). This is both possible and necessary because 
we share complex semiological languages (signs that are open for sig-



28  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

nification and different readings because they cannot produce verbal 
utterances yet are ready to speak) that we produce and perform as 
actors in public spaces. 

In many respects, being and becoming aware of the other as a 
fluid, unfixed reality is to encounter the deeper search for meaning 
and possibility that Toni Morrison calls home. Home, for Morrison, 
refers neither to the national imaginary that is the site of binary fixa-
tions of gendered, raced, and sexualized identities nor to the onto-
eschatology of a new world order; rather, it is more like an unfixed 
line of flight, a spiraling, liberated circle, the embodied yearnings or 
the yearning embodiments for a sense of wholeness that is a journey 
toward a destination that is always beyond us, elusive and eliding. In 
this sense, it deterritorializes and seeks “social space that is psychi-
cally and physically safe,” where one is no longer “prey” (Morrison 
1998, 10–11).

CHILDREN OF WIND AND FIRE

We are the children of Pentecost — of Wind and Fire! Pentecost is 
the dream that continues, and no one can claim it as their own until 
they are willing “to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before 
their God and the other.” The vision of the Pentecost is not a dream 
for cravens and cowards who hide behind false justifications for 
nonaction. It is not for spectators who stand on the sidelines and 
watch injustice and exploitation at a distance. It is not for those vain 
religionists who bury their heads in the sand like the proverbial os-
trich and pretend that everything will be all right anyway. For when 
we bury our heads in the sand, we always leave more exposed than 
is hidden. It is not for greedy and insane puppeteers who hide be-
hind the curtains of social fiction and manipulate the mindscape. 
It is not for sentimentalists and vain practitioners of an American 
Civil Religion who wave the flag higher than they wave the cross. 
It is a dream for those who are willing to join the ranks of men and 
women who are so inspired by the moral order of the universe and 
the sacredness of human personality that they are willing to make 
a track to the water’s edge and to lay their bodies down as a bridge 
for future generations to travel over into the land of freedom. It is 
a dream for those who are willing to stand alone when the crowds 
disperse, who will keep on moving against all odds, who will refuse 
to cling to falsehoods and lies that contradict reality, who believe 



PLENARy  29

that truth has the final word in this universe, and that justice and 
love will endure forever.

This is the vision of Pentecost. A dream born out of a zeal for jus-
tice, nurtured in the praxis of struggle, refined in the fires of perse-
cution, strengthened by the arms of faith, propelled by the vision of 
hope, enriched by the power of love, and set free by the truth that no 
lie can endure forever. We are heirs of the Promise that those went 
before us suffered and died for. We are the ones to whom they have 
passed the torch. We are the dreamers who must make this world a 
better place. We are the ones who must continue the story of Wind 
and Fire!

Dream on, dreamers! Dream in season and out of season. Dream 
in the valley and climb to the mountain and see God’s Holy Vision for 
a just world! See new and greater visions of the New Reality that is 
coming into the world! See a new heaven and a new earth! See a new 
kind of people rising out the dungeons of hopelessness and power-
lessness who dare to name their worlds in their own languages! See 
the rejected and dejected who sit in the shadows of darkness come 
forth as bearers of light and hope! See the humiliated and emaci-
ated rise on wings like eagles, see them run and not get weary, see 
them walk and not faint! See the land of freedom and harmony for 
the peoples of the earth! See what the prophets saw! See what the 
Pentecost crowd saw!

If your vision is rooted in justice and truth, there is no power on 
earth that can nullify its mandate. Politics can’t legislate it, poverty 
can’t define it, racism can’t destroy it, sexism can’t vanquish it, water 
can’t drown it, fire can’t consume it, death can’t kill it, hell can’t hold 
it, greedy and insane men can’t prevent it — for it lives in the mind 
of God who has said, “Yes!” And when God says, “Yes!” no power in 
the universe can say “No.” Begin again! Hope again! Struggle again! 
There is a great camp meeting in the Archive!



30  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

ENDNOTES

1 The allusion to the Angel with the Flaming Sword is a symbol 
used by Quaker George Fox, who describes his enlightening 
experience of union in this manner:

Now I was come up in the spirit through the Flaming Sword, into the Para-
dise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave unto me another 
smell than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pur 
eness, and innocency, and righteousness; being renewed into the image 
of God by Christ Jesus, to the state of Adam, which he was in before he fell. 
The creation was opened to me, and it was showed me how all things had 
their names given them according to their nature and virtue (Fox 2006, 97).

2 A fire whirl or fire devil (sometimes referred to as a fire 
tornado) is a whirlwind induced by a fire and often (at least 
partially) composed of flame or ash.

3 See Richard John Neuhaus, “Who, Now, Will Shape the 
Meaning of America?”, Folder 107, Box: 36, Office of the 
President Records (J. Richard Chase), RG-02-006. Wheaton 
College Archives. See also Matthew Rose, “The Liberalism of 
Richard John Neuhaus” (2016). 

4 Early twentieth-century commentators, like John Skinner, held 
that these were “primitive” peoples. I substituted this language 
to read “premodern.” 

5 In many ways, these imaginaries are more dramaturgical than 
philosophical or analytical. See Bulhan (1985); Foucault (1977); 
Gramsci (1971); Rodriguez (2014); Townes (2007); Walsh (1996). 
Further, see my discussion in The Ground has Shifted (Fluker 
2016).

6 Major writes, “The Table of Nations and the Tower of Babel, 
or rather the literary traditions that developed out these texts, 
aided in the demonization of non-European ethnic groups, 
as well as non-Christian and heterodox religious groups. The 
biblical texts provided a useful tool for separating out and 
discriminating against certain ethnic groups thought to have 
participated in the wickedness of Babel, but also identifying with 
an all-embracing Church that transcends diversity” (2021, 19).

7 See Eusebius’s History of the Church (1990) and Life of 
Constantine (1999). “By this sign, conquer” is a translation of 
the Latin in hoc signo vinces, a reference to a passage from 



PLENARy  31

Eusebius’s Life of Constantine (1999) which recounts how 
Constantine, leading his army, looked to the sun and saw a 
cross of light above it, along with the phrase “(ἐν) τούτῳ νίκα” 
(“In this, conquer”).

8 West references Denis Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea 
(1957); and Henri Perenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne 
(1957) contending that Charlemagne is inconceivable without 
Mohammed, and “that Europe as a noun is called forth by the 
caliphs, the Arab caliphs. For what? Imposed unity. The first 
time ‘Europe’ was used denotatively occurs in 1458, by Pius 
II, five years after the Turkish takeover of Constantinople. As 
a long story, this can begin to demystify ‘Europe’” (West and 
Brown 1993, S148).  

9 Walter Brueggemann suggests that “The narrative poses 
important issues about the practice and function of language. 
It suggests that all human language has become a language 
of disobedience.” (Brueggemann 1982, 97). Donald Gowan 
argues, “The more power they are able to concentrate the 
more harm they will be able to do to themselves and the world. 
So we ought to understand God’s decision (11.7-8) as not so 
much the punishment of sin as a preventive act to overt great 
potential evil” (Gowan 1988, 119).

10 Charette (2005) thinks that it is not a matter of small 
significance that Pentecost is celebrated along with the 
festival of the harvest, when all the seeds that were scattered 
in the early spring were collected and ready for harvest; 
he interprets this event as an allusion to Luke’s narrative 
structure and his use of the Parable of the Sower. 



32  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

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