Vanderbilt University Divinity School announces the 2025 Antoinette Brown Lecture
Antoinette Brown Lecture
to be delivered by
Keri Day, Ph.D.
Elmer G. Homrighausen Chair & Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religion
Princeton Theological Seminary
"Spirit Power: Black Feminist Pneumatic Rituals of Wonder"
Monday, March 30, 2026
Vanderbilt Divinity School
The Space
6:00 pm
Lecture Title
"Spirit Power: Black Feminist Pneumatic Rituals of Wonder”
Description
Drawing on black women’s religious cultures, Day suggests that early twentieth century black religious practices of spirit power facilitated wonder, which had epistemic and social implications with respect to legacies of slavery and antiblackness, leading to spiritual outcomes such as self-fashioning and self-possession for black communities, outcomes not necessarily measured or captured by modern ideas of political liberation (that tend to be indexed to the state). This lecture foregrounds spirit power and its outcomes such as wonder, self-fashioning and self-possession as equally important black religious responses to white fascism and authoritarianism, spiritual outcomes that black feminist discourses have amplified over the last two decades. In our current authoritarian political moment, having a capacious, diverse sense of how black communities are religiously responding to fascist regimes matters. Moreover, black religious practices of spirit power offer a way to think about the epistemic and social effects of wonder, which raise questions around the purposes and ends of black religion and Christian theology more broadly.
About the Antoinette Brown Lecture
The Antoinette Brown Lecture is made possible by a gift from Sylvia Sanders Kelley of Atlanta, Georgia. The lectures began in 1974 and are intended to "bring to the school distinguished women theologians to speak on concerns for women in ministry." The lectureship is named for Antoinette Brown, the first woman ordained to the Christian ministry in the United States (1853).