Race: A Theological Account (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: modern racial reasoning, scriptural enslavement, intertextual conversion, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, New World (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An intellectual tour de force! This book demonstrates great intellectual range and theological imagination; it should be read by all students of theology, religious studies and African American religion and history. I have nothing but praise for this work by a young African American scholar who must be reckoned with." --James H. Cone, Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary
"Jay Kameron Carter has written an extraordinarily insightful and sophisticated analysis of race as it has been constructed in modern philosophy and theology. His study reconceptualizes modernity and demonstrates the centrality of religion to any understanding of racism." --Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College
"Carter's endeavor to lift up the principle of love as both theological and moral virtue has important implications for theological and ethical discourse in teh 21st century. ...[A] great book by any standard. Its breadth adn depth are impressive beyond measure." --Christian Century
"J. Kameron Carter's Race: A Theological Account breaks new ground in contemporary theology... Carter's book has already spurred a rush of interest in Christology and race in many different theological circles. Because of its provocation, its clarity, and its comprehensiveness, Race: A Theological Account will be a seminal text in Christian theological discourse for many years to come." --Books & Culture
"This is an amazing book: in scope, scholarship, audacity, and significance. Carter takes on no less than the enitre Western philosophical, political and theological tradition in offering a Christian analysis of race, religion, and their critically bodied intersections. Painstakingly unfolding a thesis as simple as it is breathtaking, Carter shows how supersessionism finds its final resting place in modernity's hegemony of whiteness." --Religious Studies Review

Product Description

In Race: A Theological Account, J. Kameron Carter meditates on the multiple legacies implicated in the production of a racialized world and that still mark how we function in it and think about ourselves. These are the legacies of colonialism and empire, political theories of the state, anthropological theories of the human, and philosophy itself, from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the present.

Carter's claim is that Christian theology, and the signal transformation it (along with Christianity) underwent, is at the heart of these legacies. In that transformation, Christian anti-Judaism biologized itself so as to racialize itself. As a result, and with the legitimation of Christian theology, Christianity became the cultural property of the West, the religious ground of white supremacy and global hegemony. In short, Christianity became white. The racial imagination is thus a particular kind of theological problem.

Not content only to describe this problem, Carter constructs a way forward for Christian theology. Through engagement with figures as disparate in outlook and as varied across the historical landscape as Immanuel Kant, Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, Michel Foucault, Cornel West, Albert Raboteau, Charles Long, James Cone, Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, Carter reorients the whole of Christian theology, bringing it into the twenty-first century.

Neither a simple reiteration of Black Theology nor another expression of the new theological orthodoxies, this groundbreaking book will be a major contribution to contemporary Christian theology, with ramifications in other areas of the humanities.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 504 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195152794
• ISBN-13: 978-0195152791
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #288,225 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tour-de Force ! , September 26, 2008

By	Celucien L. Joseph (Fort Worth, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Prof. J. Kameron Carter of Duke University, in his recent work: "Race: A Theological Account," explains the genesis and development of the concept of "race" and "racism" in American-Eurocentric Christianity. The problem occured progressively, and particularly when Western Christianity had departed from and ultimately betrayed its Jewish root. Thus Carter observes "modernity's racial imagination has its genesis in the theological problem of Christianity's quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots." By this proposition, Carter contends that, in the process, Western christians speedily equated Western culture with Christianity (and vice versa). Through this medium, "racial imagination" came into being; resulting in "racist imagination." So the Jews were "racialized" as a people of the Orient and thus Judaism as "religion of the East" (4). Ultimately, "racial imagination" (the first step in the process) proved as well to be a racist imagination (the second step in the process) of white supremacy . Carter concurs that, "within the gulf enacted between Christianity and the Jews, the racial, which proves to be a racist, imagination was forged" (ibid). Based on Carter's theory, one can see clearly that the first step (racial imagination) and the second step (racist imagination) are integratively incorporated to advance and maintian (modern) racial preference and racism in Western-eurocentric Christendom.

Carter has written, perhaps, the most theological treatment on the issue of modern race and racism by employing the best discursive tools and scholarly rhetoric to treat the subject matter. As the title of the book rightly indicates, it is a "theological account" on race. Subsequent writers in the discipline of theology and its cognate fields would have to interact with Carter's persuasive thesis. The book is profound in breadth, elegant in style and well researched . Prof. Carter takes account the philosophical, sociological, psychological and anthropological effects of this thing we call "race." Great attention is given to the theological nature of "race" and racism" and how it has motivated and defined Western Christianity. The book is a feast for the soul!