Fall Flannery Lecture: 'Unrestricted Love: Blackness and Catholicity as Interrelated Marks of Christian Life'

About This Event

To live as a Christian today means, among other things, recognizing and celebrating the catholic breadth, length, height, and depth of di­vine grace in our diverse, globalized world. God’s love is unrestricted, and catholic Christianity bears witness to this fact.

In this talk, Boston College's Andrew Prevot, Ph.D., argues that true catholicity requires a robust Christian affirmation of black life. This claim may seem counterintuitive. If one assumes that blackness is a cultural particularity that must be held in tension with the universality of catholic Christianity, then it may appear logical to treat #BlackLivesMatter and similar black-life-affirming movements as impediments to Christian wholeness. But precisely the opposite is the case. These movements are sacramental signs of a divine love so thor­oughly unrestricted that it proudly and tenderly embraces even those lives that this violent world unjustly brands as insignificant, degener­ate, or subhuman. There is no catholicity without blackness.

About the speaker: Andrew Prevot is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Boston College. He is the author of Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality Amid the Crises of Modernity (Notre Dame, 2015) and co-editor of Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics (Orbis, 2017). He has published articles in journals such as Horizons, Pro Ecclesia, Spiritus, Heythrop, Tijdschrift voor Theologie, Transversalites, Political Theolo­gy, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.

About the lecture: The Flannery Chair of Roman Catholic Theology is an endowed Chair gift of the late Maud and Milo Flannery of Spokane, to further ex­cellence of theological study and teaching at Gonzaga University. An outstanding theologian is invited to GU twice per year to deliver The Flannery Lecture.