“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”   —James Baldwin, “A letter from a Region in My Mind” The New Yorker (1962) I appreciate this opportunity to discuss and debate the implications of my book Divine Variations. Many points were raised that I…

Terence Keel’s Divine Variations is a striking and provocative work of intellectual archaeology. Keel’s unearthing of theological patterns of thought in modern racist modes of thinking that have conventionally been understood as secular is arresting and illuminating. The book’s argument amounts to a serious re-consideration of received accounts of the history of ostensibly ‘scientific’ racism….

In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison notes that “regardless of the author, the readers of virtually all American fiction have been positioned as white.” She then raises a question: “What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced…

One of the least remembered facts of the John Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, often analyzed as a paradigmatic case study in the history of Christian fundamentalist history in North America is the influence of George Hunter’s Civic Biology textbook (1914) upon Scopes’s thought. After the controversy, Hunter removed certain parts on evolution from his…

“But, just as we got a little below Gravesend, we came alongside of a ship which was going away the next tide for the West Indies, her name was the Charming Sally, Captain James Doran; and my master went on board and agreed with him for me; and in a little time I was sent…

What does historic Christian theology have to do with modern racial science? There are good reasons to believe the answer is “nothing.” Since Max Weber advanced his theory of secularization, arguing that modern people are disenchanted with Christian theology and have divided labor into religious and non-religious institutions, influential scholars including John C. Green and…

René Descartes introduced the modern notion of a “law of nature.” The Medieval Scholastic notion of “natural law” was more of a teleological notion; and in particular with respect to human beings, “natural law” described not how we in fact behave but how we ought to behave—the “unnatural” was, in effect, the deviant. The Cartesian…

Does God break the laws of nature? Having ordained the laws in the first place, God clearly has the ability to do so. And Scripture seems to reveal God breaking such laws in the past, from axe heads that float (2 Kgs 6) to the parting of the Red Sea (Exod 14). Many answers to…

The first instinct of many would be to answer “Yes” to this question. For God to “act in the world,” they suppose, would be for God to “intervene” in the natural course of events. Such divine intervention would be an external supernatural cause that interrupts natural cause-and-effect relations and therefore contravenes the laws that govern…

You may have heard the claim that God cannot answer prayers because that would violate the laws of nature, which determine everything that happens. This view reflects an outdated, but still popular interpretation of the laws of nature. It dates back to the time when people were deeply impressed by the success of Newton’s laws…

“Complex question” is the label that logicians give to a particular kind of fallacy in which the answer to a question is already implicit in the way in which it is framed. The classic example is: “when did you stop beating your wife?” The issue that we are considering here is not quite a complex…

“Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Almost hidden within the Genesis creation account stands this singular sentence about God’s creation of humankind. Revealed is God’s creative act; implied is the dual nature of…