Founders’ Day — September 26, 2012
Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Registration is now open.
Bonhoeffer's (and Our) Postracial Blues: The election (and now the possible reelection) of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency hailed for many the dawning of the postracial condition. And yet virtually from day-one of his presidency, unpleasant racial realities intruded upon our postracial cultural fantasies—with issues of religion and Christian identity being quite often front-and-center. This lecture turns to an unlikely place—to a 1940s German prison cell and to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's prison poetry, with its African American blues signature—to examine the postracial condition of race, or his and our postracial blues.
Dr. J. Kameron Carter is an Associate Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School and a member of the graduate faculty of religion at Duke University. He has a growing number of articles and essays in the fields of theological, religious, and American and African-American studies that have appeared in various professional journals and edited books. He is the author of Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008), which explores the theological roots of the modern racial imagination and the making of racial identities. He is working on several book projects, including a book on political theology titled Fugitive Politics: A Counterhistory of Political Theology (contracted with Yale University Press) and a book on the American expatriate writer, Leftist intellectual, and Native Son author Richard Wright tentatively called (W)right Religion: The Religious Imagination of Richard Wright.
Schedule of Events
- 8:30 — Registration
- 9:00 — Opening Greetings, Graduate Awards
- 9:30 — Dr. J. Kameron Carter, Bonhoeffer's (and Our) Postracial Blues, with audience response & questions
- 10:45 — Break
- 11:15 — Eucharist, with Dr. Carter preaching
- 12:30 — Lunch
- 1:30 — Round Table Discussion with Scholars in the Field
- 2:30 — Closing
