In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion. Drawing on the black radical tradition and black feminism, Carter explores the modern invention of religion as central to settler colonial racial technologies wherein antiblackness is a founding and guiding religious principle of the modern world. He therefore sets black religion apart from modern religion, even as it tries to include and enclose it. Carter calls this approach the black study of religion. Black religion emerges not as doctrinal, confessional, or denominational but as a set of poetic and artistic strategies for improvisatory living and gathering. Potentiating non-exclusionary belonging, black religion is anarchic, mystical, and experimental: it reveals alternative relationalities and visions of matter that can counter capitalism’s extractive, individualistic, and imperialist ideology. By enacting a black study of religion, Carter elucidates the violence of religion as the violence of modern life while also opening an alternate praxis of the sacred.

In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge-that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared planet. Each of the essays in this volume attends to how climate change and our ecological crises intersect and interact with more traditional themes of political theology. While the tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt-and the critical attempts to disengage religion from his rightwing politics-the contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. Important themes include the Anthropocene, ecology, capitalism, sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, affect theory, continental philosophy, destruction, and suicide. This book features world renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Contributors: Gil Anidjar, Balbinder Singh Bhogal, J. Kameron Carter, William E. Connolly, Kelly Brown Douglas, Seth Gaiters, Lisa Gasson-Gardner, Winfred Goodwin, Lawrence Hillis, Mehmet Karabela, Michael Northcott, Austin Roberts, Noelle Vahanian, Larry L. Welborn

In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion. Drawing on the black radical tradition and black feminism, Carter explores the modern invention of religion as central to settler colonial racial technologies wherein antiblackness is a founding and guiding religious principle of the modern world. He therefore sets black religion apart from modern religion, even as it tries to include and enclose it. Carter calls this approach the black study of religion. Black religion emerges not as doctrinal, confessional, or denominational but as a set of poetic and artistic strategies for improvisatory living and gathering. Potentiating non-exclusionary belonging, black religion is anarchic, mystical, and experimental: it reveals alternative relationalities and visions of matter that can counter capitalism’s extractive, individualistic, and imperialist ideology. By enacting a black study of religion, Carter elucidates the violence of religion as the violence of modern life while also opening an alternate praxis of the sacred.

In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge-that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared planet. Each of the essays in this volume attends to how climate change and our ecological crises intersect and interact with more traditional themes of political theology. While the tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt-and the critical attempts to disengage religion from his rightwing politics-the contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. Important themes include the Anthropocene, ecology, capitalism, sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, affect theory, continental philosophy, destruction, and suicide. This book features world renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Contributors: Gil Anidjar, Balbinder Singh Bhogal, J. Kameron Carter, William E. Connolly, Kelly Brown Douglas, Seth Gaiters, Lisa Gasson-Gardner, Winfred Goodwin, Lawrence Hillis, Mehmet Karabela, Michael Northcott, Austin Roberts, Noelle Vahanian, Larry L. Welborn

In Race: A Theological Account, J. Kameron Carter meditates on the multiple legacies implicated in the production of a racialized world and that still mark how we function in it and think about ourselves. These are the legacies of colonialism and empire, political theories of the state, anthropological theories of the human, and philosophy itself, from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the present.
Carter's claim is that Christian theology, and the signal transformation it (along with Christianity) underwent, is at the heart of these legacies. In that transformation, Christian anti-Judaism biologized itself so as to racialize itself. As a result, and with the legitimation of Christian theology, Christianity became the cultural property of the West, the religious ground of white supremacy and global hegemony. In short, Christianity became white. The racial imagination is thus a particular kind of theological problem.
Not content only to describe this problem, Carter constructs a way forward for Christian theology. Through engagement with figures as disparate in outlook and as varied across the historical landscape as Immanuel Kant, Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, Michel Foucault, Cornel West, Albert Raboteau, Charles Long, James Cone, Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, Carter reorients the whole of Christian theology, bringing it into the twenty-first century.
Neither a simple reiteration of Black Theology nor another expression of the new theological orthodoxies, this groundbreaking book will be a major contribution to contemporary Christian theology, with ramifications in other areas of the humanities.