Wounded or Healing? Black Feminism and Political Theology

It is a great honour to end the 2022-23 academic year with Prof. Dr. Vincent Lloyd as our guest and to be able to discuss his paper titled - Wounded or Healing? Black Feminism and Political Theology. The meeting will take place on Monday June 26th from 4-6pm (Dutch time) at Radboud University. The zoomlink, room number and the paper have been sent via our email list. If you would like to receive it (again), please email [email protected].

Recent social justice movements, especially those influenced by Black feminism, have embraced “healing” as a framework that orients ethical and political action. This paper frames healing as a political-spiritual concept, exploring its possibilities and limitations. It examines the Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers’ account of wounding as a political-theological concept that can be placed in constructive dialogue with the political-spiritual concept of healing. Reading Spillers as a resource for political theology opens new ways for the field to understand race, gender, and sexuality as constitutive of, not incidental to, the work of political theology.

Bio
Vincent Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University, where he also directs the Center for Political Theology. He is author or editor of twelve books including Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale University Press, 2022), Race and Secularism in America (Columbia University Press, 2016), and Race and Political Theology (Stanford University Press, 2012).