Talk title: Make America Great Again’: Racial Pathology, White Consolidation, and Melancholia in Trump’s America.
Stephen C. Finley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African & African American Studies and Director of the African & African American Studies Program at Louisiana State University. He is co-editor of authored Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There Is a Mystery”… (with Margarita Guillory and Hugh Page Jr, Brill, 2014) and author of the monograph, In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Forthcoming with Duke University Press), co-author (with Biko M. Gray and Lori L. Martin) of Ivory Towers, Regulatory Technologies, and the (Re)Production of Anti-Black Violence in the Academy: Introducing Black Faculty Studies (under advance contract with Johns Hopkins University Press).
Talk title: Now It is Always Now; Blackness, Time, and State-Sanctioned Violence
Biko Mandela Gray is Assistant Professor of religion at Syracuse University. where he teaches on race, religion, and ethics. His research is on the relationship between blackness, religion, and subject-formation; his first book, titled Black Life Matter, is under contract with Duke University Press. He is currently working on his second book, which turns to Toni Morrison as a way to think about philosophical and religious ethics.
Talk title: The Devil’s Work: Race, Witchcraft, and the Demonization of the Black Lives Matter Movement
Margarita Simon Guillory is an Associate Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Boston University. She is the author of Social and Spiritual Transformation in African American Spiritual Churches (Routledge 2018) and co-editor of Esotericism in African American Religious Experience (Brill 2014). Her current project, Africana Religion in the Digital Age (under contract with Routledge), considers how African Americans utilize the Internet, social media, mobile applications, and gaming to forge new ways to express their religious identities.
In May of 2020, George Floyd was brutally killed when a police officer kneeled on his neck while other police officers stood by and did nothing. Mr. Floyd’s death evoked condemnation from across the world, leading to weeks of protests denouncing not only police brutality and racism, but the politics of domination and death. The murders of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, Atatiana Jefferson, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown are not only discrete tragedies, but events that testify to structural histories of oppression and injustice against Black people in America.
The Department of Religion at Rice University is responding to these events in part by dedicating the 2020-2021 Rockwell Lecture Series to the theme of “Religion and Black Lives Matter”. We are pleased to invite the general public to the 2020-2021 Rockwell Lecture Series that will focus on “Religion and Black Lives Matter.” Speakers will include department alumni whose research focuses on issues of race and religion, gender and economic inequality, negative nationalisms, and critical global movements and human interactions that unfold in a post-George Floyd world. The Rockwell Lectures are part of a long- term engagement by faculty and alumni whose research and teaching engage the need to confront such systemic violence on the social, cultural, political, medical, economic, and ecological levels. The lectures will also probe some of the religious dimensions of the divisive practices that determine who can live and thrive or, conversely, who experience what Orlando Patterson has called Social Death. While we have framed this series as a critique of domination and oppression, the lectures will also offer insights on the things we can do to build just communities where Black Lives Matter. They will also address materials and ideas for teaching religion.
Upcoming black history month events
