J. Kameron Carter – författare

This groundbreaking monograph promises to open a new chapter in black theology. J. Kameron Carter argues that black theology's intellectual impoverishment in the Church and the academy is the result of its theologically shaky presuppositions, which are based largely on liberal Protestant convictions. He critiques the work of such noted scholars as Albert Raboteau, Charles Long and James Cone, and argues that black theology must rebuild itself on completely new theological foundations. He lays these foundations by means of a remarkable synthesis between African-American religious history and Christian orthodoxy. Carter urges black theologians to look back beyond the Enlightenment and the rise of race theory, and to bring patristic Christology into conversation with the modern construction of race and being. He himself draws primarily on the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximos the Confessor in constructing his innovative Christology.

In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion. Drawing on the black radical tradition and black feminism, Carter explores the modern invention of religion as central to settler colonial racial technologies wherein antiblackness is a founding and guiding religious principle of the modern world. He therefore sets black religion apart from modern religion, even as it tries to include and enclose it. Carter calls this approach the black study of religion. Black religion emerges not as doctrinal, confessional, or denominational but as a set of poetic and artistic strategies for improvisatory living and gathering. Potentiating non-exclusionary belonging, black religion is anarchic, mystical, and experimental: it reveals alternative relationalities and visions of matter that can counter capitalism’s extractive, individualistic, and imperialist ideology. By enacting a black study of religion, Carter elucidates the violence of religion as the violence of modern life while also opening an alternate praxis of the sacred.