Overview

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.

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9781478020042

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Reviews

J. Kameron Carter's claim that the modern western formulations of racial capitalism and religion go hand in hand renders it impossible to think the one without the other. His interventions in this ambitious, rich, and imaginative book have the power to change the study of religion as a whole and in tremendously salutary, necessary ways. -- Amy Hollywood, author of * Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion *

“J. Kameron Carter’s claim that the modern western formulations of racial capitalism and religion go hand in hand renders it impossible to think the one without the other. His interventions in this ambitious, rich, and imaginative book have the power to change the study of religion as a whole and in tremendously salutary, necessary ways.” -- Amy Hollywood, author of * Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion * ""In our racially segregated world, this diffunity is crucial to explore, especially as a Christian. As Carter describes it, Christianity helped create a religiopolitical regime of antiblack exclusion and racial capitalist extraction. But with Carter, I too am dreaming of an alternative social order—one that is not predicated on exclusion and instead chooses to embrace difference and learn from Indigenous ways of living in harmony with all creatures."" -- Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo * Sojourners * ""In many ways, [J. Kameron Carter's] book is a prayer that brings about a childlike sense of imagination. It becomes more than an intellectual work and something I view as deeply pastoral."" -- Jordan Burton * Presbyterian Outlook *

“J. Kameron Carter’s claim that the modern western formulations of racial capitalism and religion go hand in hand renders it impossible to think the one without the other. His interventions in this ambitious, rich, and imaginative book have the power to change the study of religion as a whole and in tremendously salutary, necessary ways.” -- Amy Hollywood, author of * Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion *

Author Information

J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and is codirector of IU’s Center for Religion and the Human. He is the author of Race: A Theological Account.

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