Cassie Trentaz

Love In A Time of Fear

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How do we love people who we are afraid of?

The political climate of the US in recent years has revealed significant divisions in our nation and our neighborhoods, divisions often fueled by fear. For those who follow a call and commitment to love our neighbors, how do we love in the midst of this fear?

In this book, Cassie Trentaz looks that question in the eyes and asks her friends and neighbors in four communities currently facing pressure and often viewed with suspicion—immigrants, Muslim Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and young African American men—what feels like love to them and, alternatively, what does not. Trentaz brings their honest, heartfelt responses in their own words, helping us to know people we might not know and bringing us powerful stories of offerings of love that were received as love as well as stories of good intentions that missed their mark. She then offers us tools to help us act on what we hear. This book is both an invitation and a toolbox for listening. It takes love from a good idea to a concrete force that can speak to our fears, reach across divisions, and just might heal our world.

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Theology in the Age of Global AIDS & HIV: Complicity and Possibility

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Today’s shifting discourses regarding life and death are about theology, medicine, economics, and politics as much as they are about life and death. At the heart of one of these discourses is HIV & AIDS, a pandemic that allows for a slippery discussion about its origins and nature. Those who live in the borderland this pandemic creates are often blamed for the affliction; they are seen as ‘dirty.’ Yet, those who live or work with persons with HIV & AIDS know another story of marginalizing macrostructures that indicate that the issue is as much structural injustice as individual responsibility. Theology in the Age of Global AIDS and HIV is a courageous and challenging call to look at how dominant theologies have participated in the creation of ‘risk environments’ for susceptibility to this virus and to act so that our weeping and raging with the suffering helps us learn how to care for one another and be responsible theo-ethicists and global citizens in this age of global AIDS and HIV.

PRAISE FOR LOVE IN A TIME OF FEAR AND AUTHOR CASSIE TRENTAZ

“This is a sweet-spirited book, but also quietly devastating, because the voices she features of young people on the margins, routinely harmed by Christian Americans, have such sad stories to tell. I highly recommend this book.”

David P. Gushee –
Professor of Christian Ethics & Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University
President of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics.

“In the best of ways, I forget that Dr. Cassie Trentaz is White and that she’s a Christian. No one particular reason. She’s just that transcendent of a person which makes her work all that much more important. Unlike many contemporary books and films that seem to take a majority-cultured quick and agenda’d look into the concerns and cultures of “others”, Dr. Trentaz’s work is a slow-paced, pliable gaze into not just the lives of her subjects but into their thoughts, feelings, experiences and resolves. She invites people to share who they are and then listens in a way that makes you want to find someone or be that someone who does the same. If we all could listen and tell the story of others so well, what an inspired civilization we would be. I find her work honest, sincere, revealing and immediately useful leaving me with a sense of being honored, awakened, informed and hopeful.”

Michelle Lang – Artist, Minister, and founder of The Art of Tough Talks.

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.” –Mary Oliver

Cassie J. E. H. Trentaz is Associate Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Church History at Warner Pacific University in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Theology in the Age of AIDS & HIV: Complicity and Possibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and is a parent, partner, neighbor, teacher, minister, activist, and low-key rascal committed to inching, stumbling, and leaping toward glimpses of shalom in the world today following the lead of those often excluded.