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Category: Race: A Theological Account book event

Carter book event — Concluding open thread

Tuesday, September 6, 2011 ~ Adam Kotsko

This book event has gone on much longer than I anticipated, and now we are obviously in the midst of the beginning of the school year. As such, even though we didn’t manage to get through posts on chapter 8 and the epilogue, I think it best to conclude here. My last post wound up raising some broader questions, and we have talked in general terms about chapter 8 in connection with the rest of part III of the book, so hopefully things won’t seem too incomplete.

Here I’d like to open up the floor for any discussion of the remaining parts and particularly of any overarching questions that were not addressed in discussions of individual chapters.

I’d also like to thank Brandy, Xavier, and Anthony for their posts and Jay Carter for his enthusiastic participation in this event.

Carter book event — Postlude on Christology and Race: Maximus the Confessor as Anticolonialist Intellectual

Thursday, September 1, 2011Tuesday, September 6, 2011 ~ Adam Kotsko ~ 10 Comments

I’m posting this slightly out of order, as we’ve had a bit of a delay on getting a post for chapter 8.

In this, the final meditation on a patristic figure, Carter claims that the theology of Maximus the Confessor provides a model for anti-colonial theology, insofar as he recognizes “tyranny” as a core manifestation of sin. For Carter, this means that he is a subversive theologian, reading against the dominant social order, in a way that he claims is similar to the theological style he has uncovered in the antebellum slave narratives he investigates in part III of the book.

The bulk of his argument is taken up with demonstrating that Maximus’s theology is premised on a mutual openness between God and creation that then issues into a mutual openness among created beings — a logic that is counter to the self-enclosed and self-worshipping logic of modern racial thought, in which white supremacy claims to define all others while remaining self-defined. As an exposition of Maximus’s theology, this is very interesting and compelling and in fact makes me want to return to Maximus and study him further.

There are several weaknesses in this postlude, however, which are symptomatic of some questionable aspects of the larger argument of the book. Continue reading “Carter book event — Postlude on Christology and Race: Maximus the Confessor as Anticolonialist Intellectual” →

Maimonides and the Whiteness of Jewish Philosophical Theology

Tuesday, August 30, 2011 ~ APS ~ 6 Comments

In addition to the Introduction to Philosophy course I am also teaching another with the title “Nature, Cosmos, God” (basically a survey of theories of nature in the monotheisms and Darwin). We are going to read some selections from Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed and as I was prepping for that lecture I came across a passage where Maimonides displays some explicit racism. I thought this was interesting in the light of our book event on Carter’s Race because it calls into question some of his claims. I’ll quote the relevant section and then outline some of what I think might be going on here, but I’m no expert in Jewish thought and so am looking forward to what Bruce and Adam might have to say. Continue reading “Maimonides and the Whiteness of Jewish Philosophical Theology” →

Carter Book Event: The Death of Christ: A Theological Reading of Fredrick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative (Chapter 7)

Sunday, August 28, 2011Thursday, September 1, 2011 ~ Brandy Daniels ~ 36 Comments

In this chapter, Carter continues his “investigation about an emerging Afro-Christian sensibility struggling with and against modernity” by looking at the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass (286). Douglass, for Carter, provides further theological insights in that, whereas “Easter delivers Hammon back into captivity, Douglass’ 1845 Narrative struggles to undo this moment so that Easter will yield freedom rather than recapitulate him into bondage.” (286). Carter here is particularly focusing on Douglass’ religious critique of how America defined who he was, which proves instructive for two reasons. First, it points to the contradictions that become embroiled in emancipatory politics of identity—how “such a politics often repeats the form of the self that needs overcoming,”—and second, those contradictions illuminate how theological discourse is bound up in this, and how it contributes to the problem (287).

Continue reading “Carter Book Event: The Death of Christ: A Theological Reading of Fredrick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative (Chapter 7)” →

Carter Book Event: The Birth of Christ: A Theological Readings of Briton Hammon’s 1760 Narrative (Chapter 6)

Saturday, August 20, 2011Friday, August 26, 2011 ~ APS ~ 9 Comments

This is the opening chapter to the final part of the book entitled “Redirecting Race: Outlines of a Theological Program”. The program will provide “theological readings” of three slave narratives. The meaning of theological reading was provided in the preceding interlude on Gregory of Nyssa and in this case the requirement for reading these narratives theologically is to read them against and through the story of Christ. In the case of Hammon’s narrative the task is to both theorize the theological aspect of writing autobiographically and to read the ambiguity of the text faithfully in order to read both the way the narrative re-inscribes itself into a white supremacist narrative as well as the possibility of a narrative of liberation. Continue reading “Carter Book Event: The Birth of Christ: A Theological Readings of Briton Hammon’s 1760 Narrative (Chapter 6)” →

Carter book event: Interlude on Christology and Race: Gregory of Nyssa as Abolitionist Intellectual

Tuesday, August 16, 2011Friday, August 19, 2011 ~ Adam Kotsko ~ 1 Comment

This is the second of three sections of the book arguing that patristic thinkers provide resources for overcoming the quasi-theological racial imagination of modernity. The prelude on Irenaeus attempted to establish the ways in which the Gnostics anticipated the modern racial imagination and the ways in which Irenaeus defended against such ideas, above all (Carter argues) through insisting on the Jewish, bodily existence of Christ. Now this section, which provides a kind of threshold to Carter’s constructive account of antebellum black Christianity, focuses on Gregory of Nyssa, who rejected the legitimacy of slavery and called for the manumission of all slaves.

Continue reading “Carter book event: Interlude on Christology and Race: Gregory of Nyssa as Abolitionist Intellectual” →

Carter Book Event: Signifying Race: Charles H. Long and the Opacity of Blackness (Chapter 5)

Friday, August 12, 2011Monday, August 15, 2011 ~ APS ~ 12 Comments

Carter focuses on the work of Charles H. Long, a historian of religion in the school of Eliade and Corbin, but with a political bent towards the oppressed rather than directed to the probably racist kind of higher man you find in Eliade (and to a lesser extent Corbin). As in the preceding chapters the purpose of engaging with Long is not so much a commentary on Long’s work, but using the work of that figure as a test-case for some aspect of dealing with the problem that arises in theology concerning race. That is what is it that makes theology white. I’m not very familiar with Long’s work and so my remarks will focus on Carter’s casting of this test-case, rather than assessing his reading of Long as such, but that seems faithful to the methodology of the project anyhow.

Long provides a corrective for Carter to Tillich’s theology, for it challenges the dominance of theology over religion. This challenge is what both appears to attract Carter to Long’s theory and what he wants to ultimately reject. The difference between theology and religion is understood here to be analogous to the difference between language and act, such that theology is the language that expresses the meaning of religion. Where the religion is always more than this expression, being the experience, expression, motivations, intentions, behaviors, styles, and rhythms of a community. Like Eliade, Long values the myth and expression than symbolic expression more than the theology or structure of thought that attempts to organize more clearly that community’s beliefs. Carters problem with this ultimately will be that Long’s theory of religion cannot account for the other, signifying both God and other creatures for Carter, and instead the other is always just a way to gain self-knowledge. In other words, for Carter, Long isn’t Christological (i.e. Kenotic) enough. Continue reading “Carter Book Event: Signifying Race: Charles H. Long and the Opacity of Blackness (Chapter 5)” →

Carter Book Event: Theologizing Race: James H. Cone, Liberation, and the Theological Meaning of Blackness (Chapter 4)

Tuesday, August 9, 2011Friday, August 12, 2011 ~ xpickett ~ 21 Comments

—Xavier Pickett is the Founder and President of Reformed Blacks of America, a Philadelphia based think tank, and a Ph.D. candidate in Religion & Society at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Carter begins the fourth chapter by situating James H. Cone’s groundbreaking theological work in the history of American theology. According to Carter, “Its groundbreaking nature lies in its attempt to uncover the theological significance and political promise of black faith and existence given the racist practices and dispositions of America and, indeed, of modernity” (157). The question “what makes white theology, in fact, white?” is the central concern in examining the theology of Cone. For Carter, “how this question is answered reveals the degree to which black theology as a mode of theological reflection adequately identifies what is aberrantly theological about the modern, Euro-American discourse of race and racial character. Additionally, it reveals the degree to which black theology offers a philosophical corrective to the problem of white theology” (158).

Cone’s significant theological corrective is that “the humanity that God of Israel assumes in Jesus of Nazareth is the location from which God secures and affirms all of creation in its historical unfoldings. Continue reading “Carter Book Event: Theologizing Race: James H. Cone, Liberation, and the Theological Meaning of Blackness (Chapter 4)” →

Carter Book Event: Historicizing Race: Albert J. Raboteau, Religious History, and the Ambiguities of Blackness (Chapter 3)

Saturday, July 23, 2011Friday, July 29, 2011 ~ xpickett ~ 27 Comments

—Xavier Pickett is the Founder and President of Reformed Blacks of America, a Philadelphia based think tank, and a Ph.D. candidate in Religion & Society at Princeton Theological Seminary.

In Chapter 3, I take Carter to be unmasking the implicit theological claims of Albert Raboteau’s magisterial work, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South and unraveling their full import for thinking about subjectivity, historiography and religion. Continue reading “Carter Book Event: Historicizing Race: Albert J. Raboteau, Religious History, and the Ambiguities of Blackness (Chapter 3)” →

Carter Book Event: The Great Drama of Religion: Modernity, the Jews, and the Theopolitics of Race (Chapter 2)

Friday, July 15, 2011Sunday, July 17, 2011 ~ Brandy Daniels ~ 14 Comments

In chapter 2, Carter furthers his claim that “the story of the modern invention of race could not be adequately told apart from the story of how Christianity came to be mythologized, reimagined as the paradigmatic modern “religion”…[which] could not be adequately told apart from the story of the politics of that transformation” (80). This politics is one that marks the identity of “the people” over and against the people that it is not, and here Carter examines how this plays out over an “anxiety over Jewish existence” in modernity, using the work of Immanuel Kant as a paradigmatic example.

The Rassenfrage and the Judenfrage converge in Kant’s work, in “the hoped for modern cosmopolis, the perfect world order in which the ideal of the unity of the human species actualizes itself in the perfection of a race type, the white race” (81). In this chapter, Carter shows how this vision of the perfected white race is “based on a new conception of homo religiosus as it is articulated within his vision of modernity as a great drama of religion” (81). Carter articulates this claim through three sections.

Continue reading “Carter Book Event: The Great Drama of Religion: Modernity, the Jews, and the Theopolitics of Race (Chapter 2)” →

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