Browsing by Author "Carter, J Kameron"

This project rereads the political thought of Augustine of Hippo in the Black Lives Matter era. In the last two decades, scholars of religion and politics made a striking return to the constructive resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship, virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not sufficiently attended to Augustine’s embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder in light of the fact that the contemporary situation to which they apply his thought is itself the afterlife of slavery. The ghosts of slaves and masters live on, haunting the ongoing social meanings of blackness and whiteness in American life. To confront a racialized world, the Augustinian tradition must reckon with its own entanglements with the afterlife of the white Christian master. This reckoning demands a constructive encounter, at once timely and long overdue, between Augustine’s politics and the resources of modern Black thought. Drawing from these two intellectual traditions, this constructive religious ethics dissertation develops a critical account of the problem of the Christian master, even as it presses toward an alternative construal of key concepts of ethical life—agency, virtues, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery.

Disease metaphors dominate Christian theological discourses that equate sex with sin. When Christianity is imagined to “cure” sexuality, religious communities push out those members who are perceived to threaten the health of the social body. Progressive policy might give the impression that sexual liberation is best realized when disentangled from religion. Post-apartheid, democratic South Africa serves as a test case because it boasts having implemented some of the most progressive policies on sexuality. However, its groundbreaking laws have not curbed the country’s high rate of hate crimes, which largely target LGBTIQ citizens. In order to account for this dissonance, I elucidate the shortcomings of both progressive policy and theology before offering a constructive alternative. This project requires a transnational, interdisciplinary methodology that integrates Christian theology, critical theory, biblical theology, and fieldwork. The first three chapters critique theological and political attempts to “cure” sexuality in exchange for salvation and citizenship. These include the rhetoric of “cure” in hate crimes in present day South Africa, the coerced aversion therapy and sex reassignment surgeries performed to “cure” conscripts during apartheid, and the legalization of same-sex marriage during the transition to democracy. In conclusion, I propose that a decolonial theology based on the notion of Christ as contagion displays the meaning and purpose of baptism for costly discipleship and intimate life together.

In this dissertation, I examine the widespread failure of racial reconciliation work between black and white Christians in US American churches. I treat such failure as a failure of love, specifically the failure of black and white Christians to love each other as enemies. This sets two primary tasks for the dissertation. First, I work to understand this failure of love. Drawing on black studies—on the work of Frank Wilderson, in particular—I examine what I call the racial enemy relation, which I argue is a fundamental antagonism between black people and white people. This antagonism is grounded in and perpetuates white supremacist systems of violence and exploitation. I turn to affect theory to argue that this enemy relation is obscured by a distorted love. At the heart of this distorted love is what Sara Ahmed calls the promise of happiness. In short, I argue that racial reconciliation work fails insofar as Christians embrace an idea of love that confuses good feelings with good relations and, in doing so, are unable to confront the racial enemy relation with faithful love.

Second, I give a Christian theological account of faithful love that can guide intervention into the distorted love of white supremacy and promote a constructive approach to love of the racial enemy. In conversation primarily with black, womanist, and feminist theologies, I argue for a notion of faithful love as the embrace of the lover’s need for the beloved, while holding such love accountable to self-love, love for God, and God’s love for those who suffer. I ground this account of love in an understanding of divine love as driven by God’s need for creation, including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that in confronting the racial enemy, Christians are called to embrace their need for their enemy and to pursue that need toward conditions of mutuality in their broader society.

This dissertation argues that the emergence of the idea of Eastern Europe in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment West could be attributed not only to geopolitical causes but also to the way that the region was figured religiously. Considered against the backdrop of the rise of global racial order, the idea of Eastern Europe is shown to have its origins in Western theological imaginaries which were transmuted into gendered raciality. Through an analysis of the travelogues by Western travelers to the Russian Empire and its European peripheries, this project traces the rise of Euro-Orientalism, which gets inflected as “Asiatic” in Russia, and “Jewish” in the rest of Eastern Europe. Seen through this Euro-Orientalist lens, Russia is figured as the intra-European antithesis to the West, and the remainder of Eastern Europe, as liminal territories.