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.

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)” →

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 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)” →

—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)” →

—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)” →