Cone says, "When I picked up my pen to write 'Christianity and Black Power,' I vowed that I'd never wear a mask again when black dignity was at stake." 1 Ironically, these words found in Cone's final word, resonate with a world that necessitates masks for health, survival, and neighborly responsibility. What might be the implications of Cone's unmasked black theology in a post-Cone world? What are the implications of an unmasked black theology in a context where black, brown, and poor people suffer from a pandemic animated by white supremacist capitalism?

This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and FrankWilderson’s charges for Humanity to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes DuBois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soulof an ex White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded toshape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “formof life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm ofsocial death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form of life toward socialdeath

This paper reviews Kelly Brown Douglas’s Resurrecting Hope and brings it into conversation with certain themes in Catholic theology and with the theory of the scapegoat mechanism articulated by the French intellectual, René Girard.

Ten years ago, in an article for The Christian Century, theologian Jonathan Tran heraldedthe work of three black theologians J. Kameron Carter, Willie J. Jennings, and Brian Bantumas inaugurating a “new black theology.” According to Tran, these three thinkers represented “ amajor theological shift that [would] if taken as seriously as it deserve[d] change the facenot only of black theol ogy but theology as a whole.” Now that ten years have passed, thispaper asks: Has it? And arguing that it has not, I offer reflections on why it has not. At thecenter of my argument will be a critique of the way Carter and Bantum offered their revisedun derstanding of racial identity and hybridity by reimagining the identity Jesus throughmulatto/a bodies and persons. This, I will claim, is a dead end. It is a project that fails todo the very thing it sets out to do, and ultimately, collapses in on itsel f. My aim in makingthis critique is less refutation and more redirection. More specifically, I will hope to resolvesome of the problematic impulses in their appeal to mulatto identity, and in so doing, clearthe way for a new direction in Black Theology.

This paper argues that there exists no ontotheological grounds for black life. As such, blackreligion and, by extension, black theology should consider the ways in which black life is life thatis lived ungrounded. The central claim of this paper notes that categories such as the good life,the human, freedom, and citizenship are inadequate to account for the reality of black life amidthe totalizing effects of antiblackness. As such, black theology should position itself to imagineblack theology beyond the confines of the science of faith and other colonial markers of life andhumanity. In essence, this paper seeks to make two theological claims/interventions; first, itquestions the use of the category of the human as a liberatory figure through which the blackcan attain freedom. Second, it throws into crisis the notion of eschatological time and salvationand the inability or difficulty to account for the black who has been rendered simultaneously inand out of time. Ultimately, this paper wants to think with black feminist futurity and Afrofuturistdiscourse as generative tools to imagine black life beyond the confines of antiblackness, if at allpossible.

Anthony Reddie has said that while Black Theology has always spent a great deal of time and effort on Jesus, there has been “comparatively little on the Holy Spirit.” Recognizing this reality, one hope of this paper is to invigorate and contribute to a conversation on the Spirit in Black Theology. After a brief examination of the intriguing work of Jawanza Eric Clark, who challenges taken-for-granted views of original sin and Christocentrism, the paper will explore understandings of spirit(s) within select religions of Africa and the African diaspora. The study will build from these pieces with a consideration of possibilities for constructive pneumatologies within contemporary Black Theology. The paper’s interest in the Holy Spirit is concerned primarily with the relationship between divine power and presence and human potential and responsibility, and especially in creative formulations of this dynamic that call for human action toward social justice, wholeness, and positive transformation.