Listening as Hosts

“Listening as Hosts is a first-rate pastoral primer in the self-examination and praxis required for white churches in North America to help end racism. Sam Codington, deftly blending personal testimonies with contemporary postcolonial scholarship, strengthens the book’s urgent message. Codington convincingly shows that countering Eurocentric liturgies involves listening more acutely to issues black, indigenous, and other people of color and women encounter living in white-dominated spaces. Curating responsive rituals must start today.”


—Roy Whitaker, associate professor of Africana philosophies of religions and American religious diversity, San Diego State University





“Listening as Hosts models deep listening to a plurality of excluded voices, including the voice of earth, and it offers sober, vulnerable, place-specific liturgical experimentation. Sam Codington seeks to unfold and break open white supremacy from within his own vocation as a Presbyterian pastor; his example is instructive and poignant, his liturgies lyrical. If God is speaking as the trees, with their decades-long splendor and patience, then this book provides a tutorial in listening for students, pastors, and liturgists.”


—Collin Cornell, assistant professor of Bible and mission, Fuller Theological Seminary





“This is a beautiful, lyrical book which seeks to embody what it teaches by naming the hurt, observing the aesthetics that are embodied in ritual, listening deeply with and to pluralities, and forming liturgical vocabularies and gestures that are humble, embodied, and thoroughly grounded in a Christianity that is always transforming towards the one love Christ draws us into.”


—Mary E. Hess, professor of educational leadership, Luther Seminary





“In this beautifully written and deeply pastoral book, Sam Codington provides resources for white Christians to name and to begin to exorcize white supremacy from their liturgical spaces. Such work will not be easy, but by pitting counter-formation against malformation, Codington shows one way that churches caught up in whiteness’s allure may yet resist whiteness in pursuit of a beloved community that is not yet but may yet be.”


—Ryan Andrew Newson, assistant professor of theology and ethics, Campbell University