Hoping to see lots of blog friends, readers, and followers at the American Academy of Religion in Baltimore coming up in less than two weeks, for the special “authors meet critics” session on The Color of Christ, to be held Monday, November 25, 9 – 11:30 a.m., in Convention Center 310. The session is co-sponsored by the North American Religious History Section, and the Afro-American Religious History Group. There is a great lineup of respondents, noted below. Hope to see friends there. For those who can’t make it, there’s a great online forum on the book, published here.
North American Religions Section and Afro-American Religious History Group
Theme: Authors Meet Critics: The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America by Paul Harvey and Edward Blum (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
Stephen Prothero, Boston University, Presiding
Monday – 9:00 AM-11:30 AM
Convention Center-310
From Protestant rejections of religious iconography to the messianic mythologies of American original religions like Mormonism to the poetry of Langston Hughes to the 2008 election of Barack Obama, Jesus Christ has been a “shape-shifting totem” of religious and racial meanings. Exploring such various verbal and visual representations of Jesus Christ in The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, historians Edward Blum and Paul Harvey tell the story of “the holy face of race in America.” This round table consisting of responses to the book from scholars in various disciplines will evaluate Blum and Harvey’s explanation of “how a land settled, in part, by Puritan iconoclasts from England became one of the most abundant producers and consumers of diverse Jesus imagery.”
Panelists:
Joshua Paddison, Wittenberg University
Kathryn Gin Lum, Stanford University
J. Kameron Carter, Duke University
Responding:
Edward Blum, San Diego State University
Paul W. Harvey, University of Colorado
Jennifer Graber, University of Texas
Paul Harvey 