Bonhoeffer Otherwise
Complicity and Resistance, A Christian Question
Summer Series: July 12-August 30th – 9:30 am -10:30 am – Via Zoom
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Please join us for a discussion on how religion and politics, complicity, and resistance come together as Christian questions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Christian pastor, activist, and theologian, was imprisoned and killed by the Nazis for his participation in a coup attempt against Hitler’s regime. Bonhoeffer’s postdoctoral studies at Union Theological Seminary in 1930-31 influenced his later resistance at a time when many Christians in Germany supported Hitler.
Click here to download the Bonhoeffer Recommended reading list.
Class Schedule
July 12th David Gushee: “Does Dietrich Bonhoeffer Still Speak to Us Today?”
July 19th Reggie Williams: “Personhood and the White Male Sovereign”
July 26th Reggie Williams: “Sermon on the Mount”
August 2nd Jenny McBride: “Bonhoeffer’s Theology against Mass Incarceration”
August 9th David Gushee: “Continuity and Discontinuity in Bonhoeffer’s Writings”
August 16th J. Kameron Carter: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Religion of Whiteness Part 1: Christ and Fascism”
August 23rd J. Kameron Carter: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Religion of Whiteness Part 2: Beyond the Religion of Whiteness”
August 30th Andrea C. White: “Freedom”
Series led by:
The Rev. Dr. Andrea C. White, Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.
With guests:
Dr. J. Kameron Carter, Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.
Dr. David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University in Atlanta
Dr. Jenny McBride, Associate Dean and Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois.
Dr. Reggie Williams, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago.
Recordings:
Bios & Upcoming Speakers Dates:
July 12th David Gushee: “Does Dietrich Bonhoeffer Still Speak to Us Today?”
Dr. David P. Gushee (PhD, Union Seminary, New York) is a Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. Dr. Gushee is the elected Past-President of both the American Academy of Religion and Society of Christian Ethics, signaling his role as one of the world’s leading Christian scholars. He is (co)author and/or (co)editor of 25 books, which together have sold over 100,000 copies and been translated into a dozen languages. His most recognized works include Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust,Kingdom Ethics, The Sacredness of Human Life, and Changing Our Mind. Prof. Gushee also has published over 150 academic book chapters, journal articles, and reviews.
July 19th Reggie Williams: “Personhood and the White Male Sovereign” & July 26th Reggie Williams: “Sermon on the Mount”
Dr. Reggie Williams is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary. Dr. Reggie Williams’s book Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Baylor University Press, 2014) was selected as a Choice Outstanding Title in 2015, in the field of religion. The book is an analysis of exposure to Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, and worship at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist on the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, during his year of post-doctoral study at Union Seminary in New York, 1930-31.Dr. Williams’ research interests include Christological ethics, theological anthropology, Christian social ethics, the Harlem Renaissance, race, politics, and black church life. His current book project includes a religious critique of whiteness in the Harlem Renaissance. In addition, he is working on a book analyzing the reception of Bonhoeffer by liberation activists in apartheid South Africa.
August 2nd Jenny McBride: “Bonhoeffer’s Theology against Mass Incarceration”
Dr. Jennifer M. McBride Jennifer M. McBride (Ph.D. University of Virginia) is Associate Dean and Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to McCormick, McBride held the Board of Regents Endowed Chair in Ethics at Wartburg College in Iowa (2011-2016) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology at Emory University (2008-2009). At Emory, she served as program director for the Atlanta Theological Association’s Certificate in Theological Studies at a Georgia women’s prison.
McBride is author of The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness (Oxford University Press, 2011), a constructive theology rooted in Bonhoeffer’s thought; co-editor of Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought (Fortress Press, 2010) and co-editor of the T&T Clark book series entitled New Studies in Bonhoeffer’s Theology and Ethics. In addition to scholarly journals and anthologies, her work has appeared in popular publications like The Christian Century and CNN.com and has been featured in The New York Times. McBride’s most recent book, Radical Discipleship: A Liturgical Politics of the Gospel (Fortress Press, 2017), is based on her experience teaching theology in a women’s prison and participating in the Open Door Community, an intentionally interracial, residential Christian activist and worshipping community in Atlanta, Georgia, that for forty years has been engaged in works of mercy and justice with people experiencing incarceration and homelessness. McBride was a professor and close friend of Kelly Gissendaner, who was the only woman on Georgia’s death row until her execution in September 2015 and was a leading activist in the international #kellyonmymind campaign. Her current writing project, You Shall Not Condemn, will publish the written correspondence between Kelly Gissendaner and German theologian Jürgen Moltmann.
McBride is president of the International Bonhoeffer Society – English Language Section has served on its Board of Directors since 2008 and has served as chair and member of the steering committee for the American Academy of Religion’s “Bonhoeffer: Theology and Social Analysis” group.
August 9th David Gushee: “Continuity and Discontinuity in Bonhoeffer’s Writings”
August 16th J. Kameron Carter: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Religion of Whiteness Part 1: Christ and Fascism”
August 23rd J. Kameron Carter: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Religion of Whiteness Part 2: Beyond the Religion of Whiteness”
Dr. J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. J. Kameron Carter works at the intersection of questions of race and the current ecological ravaging of the earth. He is interested in what these intertwined issues have to do with the modern world, generally, and with America (or rather the Americas), more specifically, as a unique religious situation or phenomenon. He explores these matters with the resources of black critical theory, which is simply to say critical theory, combined with theories of the sacred and languages drawn from the domains of religion, theology, and philosophy. He also draws on feminist, gender, and queer theory, philosophy and aesthetics, and works of literature and poetries of the African diaspora as a further repertoire of resources with which to reimagine matter itself, all with a view to imagining alternative worlds, other ways of being with the earth and thus with each other.
August 30th Andrea C. White: “Freedom”
The Rev. Dr. Andrea C. White is Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. She has served as Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion and chair of the Black Theology Unit for the American Academy of Religion. She is an ordained American Baptist minister and a member of The Riverside Church with her husband Rich Landers and their daughters Mara and Chloe.
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