Biography
Jalen Parks is a second-year master of Master of Divinity candidate at Yale Divinity School from Flint, MI, USA. At Yale, Jalen's studies sit at the interstices of theological ethics, law, and abolition. As a licensed Minister in the (Black/African-American) Baptist Church, Jalen's research sits in the tension of how we might abolish Christian imperialism while promoting the types of coalition building that some churches embody in their praxes toward the end of genuine flourishing of all creation.
Paper Abstract
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson describes the "Black body's fleshiness" and how it was aligned with animals as opposed to the Christian English mind, body, and spirit. Jackson is detailing the first colonial encounters between Africans and English colonizers on the continent. In this quote from Jackson, we begin to see how the Christian (non)imagination has created ecologies in which certain bodies and life forms are subordinated. In contrast, others are exalted as the ideal way of lifelines. Many of these ecologies have been promulgated and concretized based upon bastardized readings and interpretations of Christian scripture that only serve those who have wielded the most power and created the most violence. These reflections seek to present an alternative to centuries-old epistemologies and epistemological values. The question guiding this inquiry is this: what might natural theology and animism mean for sex/uality? In other words, what this inquiry aims to do is lay the foundation for crafting a "fleshy" sexual ethic(s). This work/project is an attempt to disrupt traditional theo-ethical discourse on sex/uality by jettisoning appeals to "humanity" insofar as these appeals create a human/animal dichotomy and hierarchy in which "humans" are the dominant and ideal sentient beings, animals are abject and less than ideal, and those human beings who are marked by Blackness are demonized as animals or worse (according to the normative hierarchy).