Kelly Brown Research Articles

Resurrecting Tradition

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.

A Beautiful and Dangerous Memory

Miguel A. De La Torre rejects hope as the ethical basis for a politically effective and truly liberative form of solidarity. Kelly Brown Douglas, on the other hand, articulates a critical retrieval of hope emphasizing the interpretive relationship between the cross, the lynching tree, and the resurrection. Reading De La Torre and Douglas’s works through Natalie Carnes’s theological aesthetics suggests that their respective works can be engaged as “iconoclasms of fidelity,” or the salutary breaking of idolatrous images toward recovering faithful ones. Examining #SprayTheirNames murals that were created in response to state violence against Black people in the United States, I argue that Carnes’s aesthetics framework holds the violence of the crucifixion and promise of resurrection in visual tension, thus decrying violent oppression while offering a beautiful and dangerous memory that catalyzes hope-filled movement in defense of Black lives.

Response to Kelly Brown Douglas

Kelly Brown Douglas offered two countermeasures to aid ethicists in expanding the moral imaginary of a people: (1) examine critically the work of interlocutors and (2) change our gaze to those voices that have been traditionally refused epistemic authority. This essay explores concrete examples of these countermeasures in theological scholarship.

THE BLACK CHRIST, Twenty‐Fifth Anniversary Edition. By Kelly BrownDouglas. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019. Pp. xxxii + 144. Paper, $22.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 46, Issue 3 p. 380-381 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Theology THE BLACK CHRIST, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition. By Douglas, Kelly Brown. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019. Pp. xxxii + 144. Paper, $22.00. First published: 11 November 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.14727Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume46, Issue3Special Issue: Religion and SexualitySeptember 2020Pages 380-381 RelatedInformation

Book Review: Douglas, Kelly Brown: The Black Christ. Twenty-fifth anniversary edition

Book Review: Douglas, Kelly Brown: The Black Christ. Twenty-fifth anniversary edition

Unapologetic Apologetics: The Essence of Black Anglican Preaching

In his 1892 sermon preached at the centennial celebration of St. Thomas Church, Philadelphia, the Rt. Rev. Henry Codman Potter, bishop of New York, declared, “I do not think it would have been very strange if the colored race, after it had been freed, should have refused to follow the white people's God. It shows a higher order of intelligence and an acute discernment in the African race to have distinguished the good from the evil, in a religion that taught all men were brothers, and practiced the opposite.” In this brief homiletical observation, Bishop Potter captured the perennial challenge of the Afro-Anglican preacher, who, despite experience to the contrary, must demonstrate that the catholic and incarnational truths of the gospel are no less demonstrable in the lives of people of color. This article maintains that this is accomplished both apologetically, in the classical sense of its being argued on the basis of biblical and theological truths, yet unapologetically, in the colloquial sense of being straightforward and without apology, as in the homiletic offerings of such preachers as Demond Tutu, Walter Dennis, and Kelly Brown Douglas.

The Free Black Artist: Frank Ocean Through a Decolonial Lens

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the historical degradation of Black artists in the music industry as a form of neocolonialism wrought by largely White-owned parent companies. Using Frank Ocean’s 2016 rebellion against Def Jam Recordings and the GRAMMYs, this paper uplifts Ocean as a model for the liberation of other Black artists. This paper employs a decolonial approach that reads Negritude thinkers Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and theologian Kelly Brown Douglas through the lens of Ocean’s actions and artistry as a means to envision new possibilities for the disruption and destruction of neocolonial structures and the affirmation of Black lives as sacred.

Theology and Race

AbstractThis study develops a Christian theological response to the problems of race and anti-black racism in conversation with black theology and womanist theology. It provides a detailed introduction to multiple voices, developments, and tensions in these two theological traditions over the last half century. It offers an overview of James Cone’s arguments and their reception. It considers turns toward pragmatism and genealogy in black religious scholarship, focusing on Cornel West, Peter Paris, Dwight Hopkins, Victor Anderson, Anthony Pinn, Bryan Massingale, J. Kameron Carter, and Willie Jennings. It analyzes womanist theological treatments of intersectionality, narrative, and embodiment through Jacquelyn Grant, Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kelly Brown Douglas, Diana Hayes, and M. Shawn Copeland. Finally, it suggests some open questions related to hybridity, sexuality, and ecology. Ultimately, it argues that the credibility of Christian theological witness depends significantly on the quality of Christian theology’s response to anti-black racism.

One Womanist's View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians

In contemporary society, the devaluation of black and brown bodies in the United States is a continuing problem. Black and brown bodies falling as a result of police violence along with the continued degradation of black female sexuality or transgender sexuality (as opposed to cisgender women) in the context of Women's Marches is also problematic. In her various works, Kelly Brown Douglas highlights how Christian theology has not adequately addressed its complicity in degrading black and brown bodies. Moreover, critical social theorist Pierre Bourdieu highlighted habitus and body capital as ways to theorize around body issues. Engaging these scholars, this essay problematizes Paul's privileged use of his own body as "bearing the marks of Jesus" in Galatians 6:17. This essay argues that biblical scholarship has not adequately wrestled with the uncritical wholesale adoption of Pauline "identity" and "body" language while thinking through initial steps out of this conundrum.

Diasporic Dances: Theological Musings Betwixt and Between Blackness

ABSTRACTThis article brings Black theology into conversation with the diasporic character of Black identity, in addition to critical theorizing on late capital. By being attentive not only to the normative racializing strategy in the United States, but also attending to the persistence of colour-caste systems, the contemporary movement of global bodies and theories, and the impact of multiple performances of Blackness on racial identification, this article argues for a new theological method. This attempt to “trouble” Black race and the Black body, its use in theological scholarship, and to identify its descriptive and analytic deficiencies are facilitated by conversations with African theology, Critical Race Theory and Kelly Brown Douglas and Judith Bulter’s theories on gender and performance. Finally, this article argues for a theology of diaspora that takes seriously the troubling of race, the reconsideration of embodiedness, and the excavation of difference and variety as a liberatory project.

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. By Kelly Brown Douglas.

<i>Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God.</i> By Kelly Brown Douglas.

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. By Kelly Brown Douglas . Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015. xv + 240 pages. $24.00 (paper).

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. By Kelly Brown Douglas . Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015. xv + 240 pages. $24.00 (paper).

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God <i>by Kelly Brown Douglas</i>

Speaking of God in Stand Your Ground Times

Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas is Professor of Religion at Goucher College where she holds the Susan D. Morgan Professorship of Religion. She is widely published in national and international journals and other publications. As a leading voice in the development of a womanist theology, Essence magazine counts Douglas “among this country’s most distinguished religious thinkers, teachers, ministers, and counselors.” Her groundbreaking and widely used book Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (1999) was the first to address the issue of homophobia within the black church community. Dr. Douglas has been a pioneering and highly sought after voice in regard to addressing sexual issues in relation to the black religious community. She has been very active in advocating equal rights for LGBT persons.Her latest book, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (2015) examines the challenges of a “Stand Your Ground” culture for the Black Church and all black bodies. Other books include The Black Christ (1994), What’s Faith Got to Do With It?:Black Bodies/Christian Souls (2005),and Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant (2012). Dr. Douglas is also the co-editor of Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection (2010).Douglas is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Denison where she earned a bachelor of science summa cum laude in psychology. She went on to earn a master of divinity and a doctoral degree in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary (New York City). Rev. Douglas was ordained at Ohio’s St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in 1985. She received the Anna Julia Cooper Award by the Union of Black Episcopalians (July 2012) for “her literary boldness and leadership in the development of a womanist theology and discussing the complexities of Christian faith in African-American contexts.”Rev. Douglas was an Associate Priest at Holy Comforter Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. for over 20 years. She currently serves at the Washington National Cathedral.

The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness. By Raphael G.Warnock. New York: NYU Press, 276 pages

The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness. By Raphael G.Warnock. New York: NYU Press, 276 pages

There Is a Doubter in Every Believer

There Is a Doubter in Every Believer Veronica Golos, Poetry Editor (bio) While the notion of arguing with God may strike some as outrageous or blasphemous, it is part of the larger lament tradition that is deeply embedded in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament. —Rosann Catalano There is a doubter in every believer, and the doubt has an almost wholly positive function, for it keeps faith from degenerating into credulity. There is also, for the most part, an openness to something akin to faith in every nonbeliever, and that openness also functions positively, for its keeps disbelief from degenerating into cynicism. —Douglas John Hall Faith is either a struggle or it is nothing. —Helmut Thielicke The theme ‘doubt’ came to me after reading God and Human Suffering by Douglas John Hall.1 Surely, it is the persistence and magnitude of human suffering that prompts a nagging sense of doubt. Doubt is sound theological counsel. Feminist thinkers such as Wendy Farley, Elaine Pagels, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Judith Plaskow, Alicia Ostriker, Phyllis Trible, and Carol Christ have [End Page 95] labored to teach us that theological truth is not static and that no one person or community can claim it. The idea that the truth cannot be attained need not yield cynicism or despair. Instead, it opens the field to a range of persons, perspectives, and styles. And so the number and variety of our teachers continues to grow: for example Xochitl Alvizo, Kate Brunner, Gina Messina–Dysert, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Grace Yi-Hei Kao. In this issue, the poets show us imaginative ways of engaging the combination, or perhaps combustion, of faith and doubt. Plaskow has spoken of the need to be prepared to wrestle with God. As is the case with all poets, those assembled here enter this arena with concerns of content and form. Their lexicon is wide and varied; they call upon the mother, moon, womb, petals, wife, doves, and so on. Yet, they also seem to be surprised by the poems that emerge. They offer no specifically feminist arguments. They stand as souls saying their piece and bearing witness to the silence of God. As the poet Carolyn Forche has written, “the silence of god is god.”2 Some say that poetry is prayer. If that is true, many of our poems exemplify this quality. We begin with Mary Jo Firth Gillet’s poem “Sacrifice.” Gillet terms the “tug” of remembered faith and the doubt of adulthood the “fugue of love.” Her poem oscillates back and forth and confronts doubt as remembered faith. Madelyn Garner calls upon a “Fugitive God” to “listen” in “Concerning the Existence of God.” Her poem begins with an epigraph by Kamel Dauod, “God is a question not an answer.” And in “Steam Espresso Bar,” the poet finds herself in a dialogue with a god while getting coffee, as if all of a god’s grace is “hot and honeyed” with a slice of “orange blossom cake.” “This and this” the poet says, and God answers, “I know.” In “Guides,” Terri Muuss asks for help from any god or spirit to get through “this dusty geometry” of a world. And in “and the word was,” Muuss experiences god as light shimmering, as “smoke and no/name,” as the poem grows towards its ending, with “outstretched fingers.” Muuss’s poem is a progression toward meeting. Elizabeth Dawkins Poreba explains that “God … draws straight with crooked lines” in her poem, “May 3 Is the Feast of St. Philip, Apostle.” She is speaking to Saint Philip, both of them “good with words.” Her doubt is disquiet, which she hopes can be stilled. Then in “The Pig Nut Hickory,” Poreba draws faith from the tree, bringing us the ancient Tree of Life, as well as the barren tree “bearing nothing in its branches.” Holaday Mason asks, “Was I so careless, demons always/at the edges …?” in “Meditation on the I Ching, Hexagrams 2 & 43.” Here, silence has its bells, as the poem progresses to confidence that “everything will eventually arrive.” In her poem “Fire” she can almost tell us what Mary might have said, “such is [End Page 96] the woman’s slow...

Suboptimal nutrition in moderately preterm infants.

Acta PaediatricaVolume 103, Issue 11 p. e510-e512 Short Communication Suboptimal nutrition in moderately preterm infants Kelly Brown, Corresponding Author Kelly Brown NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK Department of Neonatal Medicine, Princess Anne Hospital, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK Correspondence Kelly Brown, NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, Southampton Centre for Biomedical Research, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Mailpoint 113, Southampton General Hospital, Tremona Road, Southampton, Hants SO16 6YD. Tel: +442380795330 | Fax: +442380794945 | E-mail: kelly.brown@nhs.netSearch for more papers by this authorMark J. Johnson, Mark J. Johnson NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK Department of Neonatal Medicine, Princess Anne Hospital, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UKSearch for more papers by this authorAlison A. Leaf, Alison A. Leaf NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK Department of Neonatal Medicine, Princess Anne Hospital, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UKSearch for more papers by this author Kelly Brown, Corresponding Author Kelly Brown NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK Department of Neonatal Medicine, Princess Anne Hospital, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK Correspondence Kelly Brown, NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, Southampton Centre for Biomedical Research, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Mailpoint 113, Southampton General Hospital, Tremona Road, Southampton, Hants SO16 6YD. Tel: +442380795330 | Fax: +442380794945 | E-mail: kelly.brown@nhs.netSearch for more papers by this authorMark J. Johnson, Mark J. Johnson NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK Department of Neonatal Medicine, Princess Anne Hospital, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UKSearch for more papers by this authorAlison A. Leaf, Alison A. Leaf NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK Department of Neonatal Medicine, Princess Anne Hospital, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 July 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.12755Citations: 7Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume103, Issue11November 2014Pages e510-e512 RelatedInformation

Do We Still Have Postcolonialism?

About a year ago Biodun Jeyifo told me of a conversation he had with one of his Ph.D. students. She had come to his office in a panic, informing him that her advisor had told her that retaining postcolonialism in her project would only hinder her job search, and that it ought not to play a significant role in her dissertation. We were in the throes of asking where the profession was going, how global studies have now become sine qua non for those seeking to teach non-Western literatures. The fragile place of African literary studies was once again called into question: what would it belong to now? And for those wishing to study and teach it, where would it figure in a job application? BJ straightened out the student and her advisor, but we remain confronted with the issue as has become widely adopted as the rubric under which the students of non-Western literatures are asked to become expert.The study of African literature within the academy has moved from an original Areas Studies approach to a contemporary World Literature approach. We should begin by asserting that both approaches are so seriously flawed as to call into question the very inclusion of African literature in the curriculum,; if that is the only way it is to be taught.For Area Studies, the risk lies in imposing a vision of Africa created by an underlying anthropology of the early 20th century. It called for understandings generated by experts in indigenous cultures and languages, and which identified native values which informed cultural texts and gave them meaning. This is the true curse not only of Orientalism in African dress, but of authenticity detectives who prescribe the attributes of what is essentially frozen cultural truths for people viewed as natives, that is, objects for experts, rather than as subjects with subjectivity.For Global Studies, the notion is equally pernicious. World Literature flattens out all cultures in the quest to find universal patterns of thought and creativity, and even more, to accept as representative texts those whose self-reflexive, postmodern postcolonial markers are highlighted within the stylistics of the current Creative Writing University Curriculum.The former approach dignifies its knowledge under that heading of Objec- tivity as the quality that provides it with its claims to truth. The latter dignifies its value under the heading of Subjectivity as the value that enhances its aesthetic claims to universal worth. The former can be said to sell the value of education; the latter to sell books and movies. Both ultimately displace a global south perspective by privileging the dominant flows of global north ethnoscapes and financescapes.Figures that give us access to the issues involved in moving toward our contemporary situation might be seen in the cell phone of Pius Adesanmi's palm winner tapper. In Binyavanga Wainaina's memoir it is his use of the term kimay and a disk of benga music.Wainaina ends his recent, hot memoir, One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011) by referring to the creation of a new Anglo-Kenyan culture, and to a noteworthy CD and documentary on benga music. He evokes how it corresponds to what he calls the sounds of languages without the languages; how it relates to a new world context for Kenyans of today, one without the past.World literature and world music are now manifestations of Jameson's definition of postmodernism as a cultural moment so fixated on the present as to erase any grounding in the past, occluding history from our readings, and resulting in what he calls pastiche.2 It is a view of culture as reduced to the bits and tracks of a video and cd.Wainaina speaks English, and sees Anglo-Kenyan as the new identity being created at independence. He also speaks Swahili, and thus fits with the audiences of the two Kenyan radio stations he had when growing up. General Service is anglicized, like the Muslim singer Abdul Kadir Mohammed who changes his name to Kelly Brown and sings world pop. …

"He Had Always Believed That There Were Two Sorts of Women: The Decent Ones and the Rest": The Female Body, Dirt, and Domesticity in Pat Barker's Union Street

In Volatile Bodies (1994) Elizabeth Grosz explains how the female body has been culturally constructed as unstable, messy “formless flow” in comparison to the controlled bodies of men. Building on these corporeal distinctions, this article interrogates the relationship between the female body and dirt in Pat Barker’s debut novel Union Street (1982). Focusing on the characters of Mrs. Brown, Kelly Brown, and Iris King, it examines the hierarchy of respectability that exists on this northern street, considering how this relates to the perception of female corporeality as “dirty”. Working through the good woman/bad woman distinction at the heart of life on Union Street, it explores how the different attitudes these women have to their bodies are reflected in their relationships with domestic space.

The impact of bonding material on bracket failure rate

Orthodontic therapist Kelly Brown describes the results of a clinical audit carried out at her practice.