Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/11/2020
10:00 am - 11:00 am
Category(ies)
The Humanities Center is pleased to welcome Willie James Jennings as our Faith & Imagination guest speaker on Friday, Dec. 4 and Friday, Dec. 11. Willie Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale, 2010), which won the American Academy of Religion Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion the year after it appeared and, in 2015, the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the largest prize for a theological work in North America. It has been called a “theological masterpiece.” It is also widely used in college courses around the country. Christian Imagination will be the subject of Jennings’s lecture and workshops on Dec 4.
On Dec 11, the focus will be on his new book, After Whiteness: A Theology of Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020). Here ordained Baptist minister Willie Jennings seeks to inspire religiously-oriented education that can bring people together in “God-drenched communion,” thereby cultivating “the radical belonging that is at the heart of God’s transformative work.”
Given Professor Jennings’s accomplishments, passion, and message, it is not surprising that he chairs the Committee on Race and Ethnicity for the national Association of Theological Schools (ATS), has led a number of faculty workshops for the influential Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, has consulted at a variety of universities and theological seminaries on graduate education, and has given named and invited lectures at more than two dozen universities in the past decade. It should be an outstanding pair of events to have him interact with our BYU community.
He will start off each Friday with a 50-minute, overview lecture (10:00-10:50) in which he will summarize in accessible fashion the highlights and insights of the book. After a break, two workshops will follow (12:00-1:30 and 2:00-3:30) for those who have read the book and pre-registered.
The Zoom link and more information can be found here: https://religiousoutreach.byu.edu/jennings
The schedule will be as follows:
Friday, Dec 4
10:00-11:00 am Overview Lecture on Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
12:00-1:30 pm Workshop 1 on first half of Christian Imagination
2:00-3:30 pm Workshop 2 on second half of Christian Imagination
Friday, Dec 11
10:00-11:00 am Overview Lecture on After Whiteness: A Theology of Belonging
12:00-1:30 pm Workshop 1 on first half of After Whiteness
2:00-3:30 pm Workshop 2 on second half of After Whiteness
