“Immaculate Misconceptions is a submersive work committed to bloom, to a Blackness that is fluid and capacious and generative as source, to a world that considers birth and creation as sacred and possible and true, and in the possibility of a Christian theological imagination that breathes life, even through wounds and scars. This book argues a fundamental premise for Christian theology writ large: Mary is Black.”
So writes Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones in the introduction to Immaculate Misconceptions. In those lines, in their syntax and semantics, we have the book: complex, playful, thoughtful, pointed, and transformative. Rooted in Christian theology, Black thought, and feminism while weaving together those traditions to form something new.
I was unsettled by this book. Before reading it, I accepted a decline narrative: Once, liberationist theology was sharp and deep, and was uniquely important in orienting Christians toward God. Then, the needed inflection of liberationist theology by concerns now abbreviated as intersectionality had the unfortunate effect of tethering it to the world, to the secular idioms of identity. When the political moment lent itself to liberationist thinking again, in the 2010s, the most exciting work was happening in spaces that were the theological equivalent of spiritual-but-not-religious, drawing on themes such as mysticism, apocalypse, and embodiment in ways that no longer related to Christian tradition as authoritative. (The least exciting work from that period simply repeated, as unintentional farce, the liberationism of a half-century earlier.)
After reading Immaculate Misconceptions, I am convinced that the liberationist strand of Christian theology remains viable, so long as it remains nimble. That is a fine way to describe Adkins-Jones’s thinking: moving between history, art, and culture, engaging multiple strands of critical theory in all their rigor, and unafraid to make bold constructive moves. Adkins-Jones has written a book that is at once the opposite of systematic theology and the very best of systematic theology. System comes from formation but also experiment, from reading deeply but also widely, from the right integration of playfulness and seriousness.
Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones has shown that Black theology and feminist theology are not adjuncts to Christian doctrine. In their conjunction, there is no better tool for explicating issues at the heart of Christian doctrine.
We have invited scholars of religion from a variety of disciplinary and regional backgrounds to address Adkins-Jones’s book. Rather than pushing her with the concerns of intersectionality, they attend to the resonances between her project and their context. In doing so, they invite us to consider how Immaculate Misconceptions speaks to us.
Thanks are especially due to TJ Bryant for the original idea for this symposium.