Update: This event has been postponed due to inclement weather in New York City, which prevented Professor Cone from being able to travel.
Tragedies of the past year, including the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York, among others, have catalyzed conversation by highlighting the injustice which, for the lives of many individuals, is typical.
But these deaths have also raised questions about how one organizes movements, what constitutes justice, what meaning the past has for the present, and what role religion plays in current struggles.
Theologians, scholars, and activists James Cone and Mark Jordan will speak to these questions at Harvard's Memorial Church on March 5.
"(Un)Familiar Deaths: Politics of Death and Dying in the Contemporary World," the upcoming twin lecture organized by Harvard Divinity School's Science, Religion, and Culture program (SRC), offers a chance to explore further the issues Cone and Jordan have made central to their work.
"The dichotomy of familiar and unfamiliar refers to the familiarity of specific deaths, based on their frequency and numbers, but unfamiliarity also highlights how these deaths fall at the margins of society and are accompanied by dehumanization and demonization," said SRC director and HDS professor Ahmed Ragab.
"Cone and Jordan will discuss how we can understand these processes of marginalization and comprehend the links that connect the just-now to the history of now. Selma and the AIDS epidemic are very much part of the contemporary. They are part of the history of police killings of black men and suicides of queer teens. These insights are sorely needed additions to current public debate and will arm us with new tools to deal with these questions."
James Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, wrote Black Theology & Black Power in 1969. It remains one of the founding texts of black liberation theology and one of the pivotal theological works of the twentieth century. Looking to merge Christianity, the lived experience of black Americans, and the politics of the black power movement, Cone followed this book with a series of works that identified Christ directly with the oppressed.
Mark Jordan, Professor of Christian Thought at HDS and one of the most prominent voices on sexual ethics and queer theology, writes of God's presence at other margins. Christ lives not only in "the black ghetto, making decisions about white existence and black liberation," as Cone has written, but also in queer communities, which are so often rejected and condemned by strands of American Christianity.
For many in these communities, Christianity functions as an instrument of repression. As Jordan writes in Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk About Homosexuality, "Queerness threatens to disrupt the smooth passage, to distend adolescence, so that it can never be brought to the safe harbor of wedded … bliss."
For both Cone and Jordan, religion is interwoven with social justice, with politics, and with those victim to often-fatal systems of discrimination. Religion works to marginalize and abuse; it makes power and violence familiar aspects of daily life. At the same time, however, faith is also a resource for the oppressed, whether they be members of queer communities or communities of color. Faith works to reveal the deadly consequences of political exclusion as they truly are shocking, visible, and disturbingly unfamiliar.
"(Un)Familiar Deaths: Politics of Death and Dying in the Contemporary World" will take place Thursday, March 5, 6:30 pm, at The Memorial Church.
—by Lewis West