McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, & Public Life Annual Conference 2024 | Christian Humanism and the Black Atlantic

McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, & Public Life

Annual Conference

Christian Humanism and the Black Atlantic

5^th – 7^th June 2025

Oxford University

‘So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the human!”’ John 19.5

Outline

The conference examines theological concepts of the human, with a particular focus on how these are articulated through Christian humanism and within the context of what Paul Gilroy calls the “Black Atlantic.” Christian humanism as a moral and political framework takes its cue from Scripture. “Here is the human (ánthrōpos)” declares Pilate. The Christian tradition reads Pilate as presenting Christ as the measure and form of the human. Christian humanism develops in the wake of this proclamation as theologians, artists, pastors, and political leaders imagine and narrate what it means to be human, and the proper form and shape of human life together, in the light of the revelation of Jesus Christ as the true human.  But Pilate next hands this human over to be brutalized and killed by a judicial system serving the needs of the Roman empire. Christian humanism thereby wrestles with what threatens, destroys, and desecrates what it means to be human as well as what inhibits each person from fulfilling who they are as one for whom Christ died and in whose resurrection their humanity is set free.

The conference describes and interrogates Christian humanism as it emerges in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century onwards, a world that connects Europe, the Caribbean, Africa and the Americas in a tangled web of material, cultural, and religious ties. What is called “modernity” emerges in part through the interactions shaping the Atlantic world, interactions that led to the creation, destruction, and re-formation of whole cultures across the Atlantic basin. Whether it is the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Atlantic slave trade, modern imperialism, a fossil fuelled, industrialized, and consumerist way of life, the Westphalian order of nation-states, or the creation of modern banking and monetary systems, the afterlife of this world lives on in our world, and indeed as our world.

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.

Given that Christianity as a creolized faith is a product of a long, complex, and dynamic history, this conference embraces the challenges presented by the contestated nature of how to interpret the tangled web of relations that shape Christianity in the Atlantic world. Rather than simplistic narratives of decline or progress, the conference seeks to advance sober, historical, and richly theological reflection that narrates a world marked by disgrace and grace, that is shaped by the horror of crucified peoples but also the joy of resurrection life.

The conference will open with the annual McDonald Public Lecture being given by Paul Gilroy. Winner of the highly prestigious Holberg Prize in 2019, Gilroy is an eminent public intellectual and one of the world’s leading scholars of race and racism. Professor Gilroy will reflect on the need to recover a notion of shared humanity and what he calls “reparative humanism.” It will also celebrate the launch of Anthony Reddie’s forthcoming book Living Black Theology: Issues of Pedagogy, Mission and Praxis (Oxford University Press). Subsequent papers explore different aspects of Christian humanism, some directly in response to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic framework, while others focus on different articulations of Christian humanism. The conference closes with a panel of those who draw on Christian humanism to frame their mission and ministry in public life. Papers from the conference will be published as part of a forthcoming special issue on Christian humanism in the academic journal, Modern Theology.

Presenters

• Paul Gilroy, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London
• Anthony Reddie, Oxford University
• Jenifer Herdt, Yale Divinity School, Yale University
• Jonathan Tran, Honors College, Baylor University
• Jens Zimmerman, Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good, Regent College
• Tracey Roland, University of Notre Dame Australia/Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences
• Luke Bretherton, Oxford University
• Chine McDonald, Theos
• Anne Snyder Brooks, Cardus/Comment Magazine

Programme, accommodation, and full registry details available in the new year. 

To register interest and receive notification of when registration opens email: Julie Arliss julie.arliss@theology.ox.ac.uk