| Race: A Theological Account | 
 enlarge | Author: J. Kameron Carter
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 191374
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 504
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 0195152794
Dewey Decimal Number: 270.089
EAN: 9780195152791
ASIN: 0195152794
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
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Condition: Brand new hard cover with dust jacket just arrived from publisher - ships with tracking #
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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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A Tour-de Force ! September 27, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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. I'm afraid Carter is perhaps close to the truth.
Carter has written, perhaps, the most theological treatment on the issue of race and racism by employing the best modern tools and rhetoric to treat the subject matter. As the title of the book rightly indicates, it is a "theological account" on race. Subsequent writers in this interested area 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!
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