When Redemption Dances on Your Grave: A Politics of Hope

Guest lecture by Dr. Andrea C. White.

What is a theology of hope considered according to its political refusals?  Black nihilism renounces hope as ideological counterfeit and instrument of fantasy.  Climate catastrophe controverts facile recourse to optimism about the modern world.  A theological account must attend to hope’s precarious history in the Christian West.  Detached from wishful thinking and instead traced as a force of indictment, fissures of hope mark and interrupt its hegemonic deployment with a radical denunciation of the status quo and its constitutive violence. The site of the cut opens the absurd logic of divine promise and yearning.

Bio

Rev. Dr. Andrea C. White is Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.  Her teaching and research fashion a nexus between womanist theology, black critical theory, and phenomenology.  She has two book projects underway, Fissures of Hope and Scandal of Flesh: Black Women’s Bodies, God and Politics.