Events

Facilitator: Katie Geneva Cannon, Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics, Union-PSCE In addition to legal, economic and political mechanisms, slaveholders knew that they needed religious legitimatization within dominant society if they were to keep racial slavery viable. In this workshop participants will unravel the various codes of ethics that lie behind the legacy of slavery in the Christian Church community. We will analyze the theological commitments which tolerated, justified, and sanctioned oppression against African women, men, and children, in order to spell out how specific life-lessons informed people of faith in previous generations and currently. We will do a close textual reading of three books: Jubilee by Margaret Walker (Mariner Books); The Price of a Child by Lorene Cary (Knopf/Vintage); and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis (Oxford University Press).