FALL QUARTER 2015 EVENTS (Tentative):
Tuesday, September 29, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Meet & Greet
Come meet other students interested in Global Christianities and share your ideas for the workshop. Lunch will be provided.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Hector Varela
Florida Water: Meaningful and Messy Hybridity in the Atlantic Modern
Abstract: Florida Water, a perfume produced by a U.S. company for more than two centuries, has become a powerful signifier in Latin American communities. Agua Florida, as it is called in Spanish, is ubiquitous and polyvalent, used for cleaning the house, and, for some, for purifying the body and space in religious ritual. The paper explores Agua Florida’s cultural agency, inter-religious relevance, and quotidian liminality as an example of messy while meaningful hybridity.
Lunch will be provided.
Co-sponsored with the Theology & Religious Ethics Workshop.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Recent Scholarship Discussion
We will discuss a recent influential article about Global Christianities (article TBD). Please email contact-global-christianities@lists.uchicago.edu for a copy of the article in advance.
Bring your own lunch.*
Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 1:30-2:45pm (Swift 200)
Rev. Saeed Richardson
Ghana as a source of pilgrimage for Black American Christians
University of Chicago Divinity School 2015 International Ministry Study Grant
Abstract: Many Christians in the United States speak of pilgrimage to the Holy Lands that border the Mediterranean Sea. Knowing one’s physical family origin, it becomes a matter of completeness to walk in the origins of one’s spiritual existence, too. However, for the great majority of Black Americans in the United States, there is no family origin to complement those spiritual roots. Furthermore, the very concept of pilgrimage – a rite that supposes powerful change internally and externally – is foreign to most who live in broken, underprivileged communities. This study explores pilgrimage as a theological and anthropological model for Black Americans to make sense of their ancestral heritage, their Christianity, and slavery. The 8-week long venture spanned conversations with pastoral leaders, chiefs, civic leaders, elders, men, women, and even children, across eight regions in Ghana, investigating three primary questions:
1. What does it mean to be Black?
2. What does it mean to be Christian?
3. How does one live at the intersection of questions one and two in a post slavery world?
Can walking in a distant homeland impact one’s community thousands of miles away? Can pilgrimage to Ghana dispel the severed connection to African history the majority of Black Americans experience? In light of the many issues that have divided the American Black community over the last 50 years (violence, drug & alcohol abuse, incarceration to name a few), can pilgrimage be a unifying and empowering resource, in much the same way that pilgrimage is for our Jewish and Islamic siblings? Surely these insights if studied and found valuable would be of great worth to congregations, neighborhoods, barbershops, hair salons, and families not just on the South Side of Chicago but across the nation, and perhaps even in Ghana. One can dare to believe it will have such effects.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Reuben Lillie
Metaphysics and the New Birth: Regenerating Wesleyan Convictions
Abstract: This paper examines some remarks about Wesley’s distinctive contributions to soteriology as they relate to anti- or post-metaphysical theology as framed by Bruce McCormack in an essay, “Sanctification after Metaphysics: Karl Barth in Conversation with John Wesley’s Conception of ‘Christian Perfection’” (ed. Kelly Kapic, Sanctification: Explorations in Theology and Practice [IVP Academic, 2014]). McCormack focuses on Wesley’s “new birth” language while contending that Barth improves upon the matter through a primarily christological ontology (and therefore, at least for McCormack, not grounded by metaphysics). In this paper, I briefly weigh the options McCormack presents against other approaches to the problems of metaphysics for soteriology, namely the approaches of D. Stephen Long and Kevin Hector. That is, with the aid of Hector and Long, I intend to show that (a) McCormack’s approach to Wesley via Barth is an option rather than a necessary trajectory once certain metaphysical assumptions are set aside, and that (b) present scholarly conversations concerning metaphysics and theology require a fresh look at the aims of the Wesleyan tradition – what can and/or should be maintained and what may be done without.
Bring your own lunch.*
Tuesday, December 1, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Hank Owings
Bring your own lunch.*
Thursday, December 3, 2015, 4:30-6:00pm (Swift Hall Common Room)
End of Quarter Social: Christmas traditions from around the world
Please come and share stories about Christmas traditions from the region you study.
Refreshments will be provided.
*Our budget does not allow us to provide lunch at all of our meetings. However, on weeks when we will not be providing a full lunch, we will bring ingredients to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so nobody will go hungry 🙂