The conference is free and open to the public
Prominent scholars will explore the current and future impact of the black church during a time of deep divisions in race, culture and religion at a Vanderbilt Divinity School conference April 3-5.
Vanderbilt’s Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies will host “The Black Church’s 11th Hour: The Promise of Our Ideals and the Realities of Our Time.”
“When one reflects upon the significance of this year – 2013 – it marks a particularly bittersweet moment in the history of the African American experience in the United States,” said Forrest Harris, assistant professor of ministry and director of the Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies. He noted that 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. It is also the 45th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.
“Even prominent scholars of African American religion, thought and culture like Eddie Glaude, have argued, ‘The black church, as we’ve known it or imagined it, is dead,’” Harris said. “Yet, for many of its faith practitioners, the black church still is a necessary institution for black social uplift and spiritual empowerment that evokes a sense of needed affirmation, peoplehood and the prospects of social transformation.”
The conference, free and open to the public, starts April 3 with the opening lecture by James H. Cone, the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary. His books include Black Theology & Black Power, God of the Oppressed, and Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream of a Nightmare? Cone’s latest work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, is also the title of his campus lecture, which will be in Benton Chapel at 7 p.m.
On April 4 the conference moves to the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center. Following brief opening remarks by Cone at 10 a.m., there will be a panel discussion. “A Crisis of Faith” features Peter Paris, the Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor of Christian Social Ethics Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary; Delores S. Williams, the Paul Tillich Professor Emerita of Theology and Culture, Union Theological Seminary; and Lewis Baldwin, professor of religious studies, Vanderbilt.
The second panel, “If Wasn’t for the Women,” will be from 1 to 3 p.m. with Stacey Floyd-Thomas, associate professor of ethics and society, Vanderbilt; Valerie Bridgeman, associate professor of Hebrew Bible/homiletics and worship, Lancaster Theological Seminary; and Teresa Fry-Brown, professor of homiletics and director of black church studies, Emory University. The third panel, “A Creative Exchange,” features three Vanderbilt faculty members: Victor Anderson, the Oberlin Theological School Professor of Ethics and Society and professor and director of the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies; Juan Floyd-Thomas, associate professor of black church studies; and Richard Pitt, assistant professor of sociology.
Registration is required for the April 5 event at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
For more information, email Sha’Tika Brown or call 615-936-8453.