I’ll be joining amazing speakers including Paul Gilroy, Anthony Reddie, Anne Snyder, Michael Wear, Luke Bretherton, and more at this conference. More details here, but a snippet of the idea below:

Within the fractious politics of memory haunting the current culture war some deny the traumatic inheritances of this past, instead narrating the story of Christianity as a triumphal tale of a movement from the west to the rest. Others tell an equally reductive story, also centred on a west to the rest narrative, but in this version, Christianity is a force for all that is wrong with the world: namely, sexism, racism, rugged individualism, intolerance, and an instrumentalizing, wholly extractive relationship to nature. This conference addresses these highly reductive narratives by exploring different ways of narrating our past and its many fates and futures. These different narrations attend to how the Atlantic basin was a key context within which modern Christianity emerges through a history of interaction and exchange between multiple cultures.  Here Christianity both forms and responds to processes of modernization and in the process becomes a “creolized” faith to which many peoples contribute. Hence the conversation this conference convenes makes use of Paul Gilroy’s term “the Black Atlantic” to designate this period and geography – a time and space in which theology and the church is racialized, race is theologized, and the church creolized. Some presentations at the conference will explore the continued, real-world impacts and conflicts that arise within the matrix of the Black Atlantic for those racialized as Black and how they relate to their own bodies and to others.