Religion,  showing/thinking

showing/thinking: Tina Pippin

Tina Pippin is the Wallace M. Alston Professor of Bible and Religion at Agnes Scott College. She holds a B.A. from Mars Hill College, an M.Div. from Candler School of Theology, and an M.Th. and Ph.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Professor Pippin’s interests include the Bible and culture, women and religion, ethics, religion and social justice, science and religion, human rights education, apocalypticism, religion and postmodernism, and feminist ethics. Below are Professor Pippin’s reflections on her scholarship and work as an ally, from the 2014 Dalton Gallery exhibition showing|thinking, a series of exhibitions that highlighted the work of faculty and staff on campus:

“In the last analysis, we change ourselves to the extent we become engaged in the process of social change.”  -Paulo Freire

I grew up in what Flannery O’Connor called the “Christ-haunted” South. Inequities of race, class, gender, religion, nationality, region, and many other categories were identifying markers in my small town in eastern North Carolina. I came to my main research area, biblical apocalyptic literature and culture, by simply growing up in this space in the 1960s and early 1970s. The KKK still burned crosses, the sharecroppers still picked tobacco at poverty wages, and the textile mill provided needed working and middle class jobs, and also not needed pollution (e.g. asbestos poisoning). My mother used to describe the desolate part of the state we lived in as “a hell hole above ground.” Of course the area is evolving; for example, NYT food writer and flexitarian Mark Bittman recently stated that the only place he would go out of his way to get meat is a barbeque restaurant near my hometown. I am in total agreement, although all the pictures of Senator Jesse Helms on the walls still scare me….

In this buckle of the Bible Belt, the beginnings and endings of the biblical text (creation and catastrophe) were central. The last book of the Christian bible (The Apocalypse of John, aka The Book of Revelation) was not part of the official canon in the Episcopal Church I sometimes attended, yet this text had a clear authority in the rhetoric of many Christian churches in the area. A belief in “the Rapture” in which Jesus comes down from the clouds and collects the true believers was what many of my friends believed in and desired (even though this concept is not in the Apocalypse of John). I found more logic in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings than in the broken promises of end-time preachers. In these novels I could follow another Pippin and his friends through their adventures to save Middle-earth. And I found a happy ending in these stories, as opposed to the doom-filled biblical end, for it was common knowledge that Episcopalians would not be part of God’s future city. The roots of my scholarship and activism are thus geographically rooted, and my focus in apocalyptic studies emerged from my finding a way through tobacco fields (summer work) and conservative politics (family and region). Thus I came to understand the biblical (and secular) fantastic as a literary, cultural and political genre. I think my curiosity about such apocalyptic things pushed me to figure out how to face apocalypse— how to counter the destructive, desire-driven, doom-filled narratives. Now that I live in Atlanta a constant source of apocalyptic rhetoric is the Georgia legislature that gives social justice activists so much work. But the rhetoric and reality are much closer than the capitol building, encroaching on our campus. For example, I look to the railroad track across from Agnes Scott (trains hauling nuclear material in the 1990s and at one time a proposed route for nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain). And I see the ways the southern plantation’s racial and class divisions continue in a system that reinscribes the working poor on our campus. I see the apocalypse as existential, immediate, historically-rooted, future, and relational, while opening other visions for what M.L. King, Jr. called the possibility of creating “the beloved community.”

These apocalyptic narratives are all around us, and from my ethics professor in graduate school, Glen Stassen, I learned that ethics starts with the self and is embodied action. So as his graduate students we worked on the Nuclear Free Zone campaign, starting with the fallout shelter in our school’s administrative building, to the campaign for instating Louisville as a Nuclear Free Zone, to the Nuclear Freeze Movement. I learned to start with the spaces one inhabits—body, home, work, city, state, nation, and so forth. When I think about my research in biblical apocalyptic, I necessarily have many conversation spaces and partners. And my activism informs my scholarship and vice versa.

As I continue to learn my way into the word “ally” as a verb, I am grateful to my colleagues in the Agnes Scott Living Wage Campaign— especially to Della Spurley, who was one of the organizers of the first (and until quite recently, only) unionized facilities staff in higher education in the state of Georgia. The hourly staff have been making labor history for over thirty years. And I am continually grateful to the many student leaders who have stepped up to practice solidarity with hourly staff (outsourced and not), breaking the barriers (invisible and not) of institutionalized racism and classism. Hourly staff face the personal apocalypse of poverty wages and lost unemployment benefits, while at the same time modeling a loyalty to the students they serve and work with. Our campaign is about facing this apocalypse of poverty wages and working toward a more just workplace with three main focal points: just wages, institutionalized respect, and democratized workplace. 

One of my roles is also to face my privilege as a tenured, full professor—a dangerous space because I can always shut my door (and myself) to my accountability for working toward the basic human right (UDHR articles 23-25) of a liveable wage. The education I receive in this campaign keeps me growing—and hopeful for the future.

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