For me, the best books are the ones that give you something different each time you return to them. Whether it's things you saw before, but in a new light, or entirely new things, your conversation with them continues. Deepens.

In January, I wrote a bunch of words reflecting on some of the things that a first reading of Willie James Jennings' book After Whiteness said to me. Over the past term, I've had the opportunity to read the book again, in discussion with a group of my peers here at college, and not only has it given me new things in my own re-reading but through the reading and reflecting of others. As as this is doing its work in me in dialogue with my initial thoughts, I thought I'd note three things that struck through our group's conversations.

Firstly, the way that most of the ideas and concepts Jennings' talks about in relation to education and formation can operate for good or for ill in the formation of individuals and in systems. Fragments, attention, resistance, building, assimilation, introspection, revolution: all of these can operate on and around us in ways that colonise and control us, doing damage to us, or that can open us up towards God and each other for communion. This isn't so much about 'balance' and recognising the good in our past, though, as it is about a deeper conviction that things just can and do work for good or for ill depending on so many things in and outside of us — and an argument for great care for and attention to these things in us an in the systems we are enmeshed in if they are to work for good.

Secondly, that it is easier to see how you have been formed in ways that are damaging than it is to see how you can be and probably are involved in doing the damage. This isn't to say that the damage isn't real: any one of the people in our group would have been able to identify ways that the problems Jennings identifies has done harm to them. BUT I am grateful to the group to continuing to try to pay attention where we are prone to replicating that harm and for reminding me of it. One of the things I noted in January was Jenning's interest in orthodoxy. One of the things that I'm thinking about now is how attentiveness to orthodoxy and orthopraxy and to the sense that 'not anything goes' is one of the key places for me to be aware of my part in this replication.

And finally, that care and attention become, in a way, the key 'virtues' here. After Whiteness doesn't offer action plans and things to do — in fact its closing words are on the value of talking together and how it matters for bringing our hopes into focus. It is a deeply grown-up theology in many ways, that acknowledges the agency and ability of everyone to reflect and be and act, but also asks for responsibility with those. It asks us to pay attention to how we are and how the webs and systems we are a part of are, with a deep level of care for ourselves, yes (Jennings' distinction between discerning and evaluating matters here, I think) but primarily for those who are a part of them with us, and in an ongoing recognition of the brokenness we operate within. This is the most profoundly challenging part of After Whiteness, in my view: that it resists the easy answer, the desire for the one right thing to do and the simple solution, to demand that we keep on resisting malformation in a deep entanglement with others