Dear Workshoppers,
It’s been too long! I hope your holidays were wonderful, and that you’re all having an easy enough time getting back into the swing of things. I’m pleased to announce that our first Religions in America meeting will take place next Thursday and feature our own Professor Curtis Evans discussing the first chapter of his forthcoming book,
A Theology of Brotherhood: The Federal Council of Churches and the Problem of Race
DATE: Thursday, January 23
TIME: 12:00 – 1:15
PLACE: Marty Center Seminar Room (2nd floor of the Divinity School)
The book seeks to historicize the way race was theorized and regarded as a moral problem by the Federal Council of Churches in the cultural and intellectual context of the 1920s. Why at this particular moment did the FCC form a Department of Race Relations? The first chapter attempts to determine how useful or helpful it is to distinguish between internal factors (its theology, the make-up of its membership, their educational background, a broader narrative about social gospel thought, etc) and external factors (a cataclysmic world war, black migration to the Northeast and Midwest, intellectual currents such as a liberal environmentalist conception of race in the social sciences gaining ascendancy and challenging the dominant paradigm of scientific racism, etc.) in accounting for the provenance of this department devoted specifically to addressing racial issues.
To obtain a copy of the chapter, please email me at shields@uchicago.edu. I hope to see you all there!
— Kit