Greensboro College Presents 55th Annual Ward Lecture March 29th
March 14, 2018
GREENSBORO, N.C. – Greensboro College presents its 55th annual Jean Fortner Ward Lecture on issues of faith and higher education at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 29, in the Hannah Brown Finch Memorial Chapel on campus.
The event is free, and the public is invited.
The speaker will be Andrew T. Draper, who serves as director of the Honors Guild and teaches theology in the Department of Religion and Biblical Studies at Taylor University.
His lecture is titled, “Place Matters: Resisting the Racialized Optic.”
Draper earned his Ph.D. in theological ethics from the University of Aberdeen. His areas of concentration are interdisciplinary in scope, including theological ethics, theology and race, biblical theological exegesis, community development, disability theology, historical theology, leadership, spiritual formation, and urban ministry.
Draper recently published “A Theology of Race and Place,” a nationally acclaimed scholarly monograph published with Pickwick Publications, a division of Wipf & Stock. In this book Draper examines what he perceives to be a world marked by the effects of colonial displacements, slavery’s auction block, and the modern observatory stance, asking whether or not Christian theology can adequately imagine racial reconciliation.
Draper’s work assesses varying historical, religious, and cultural factors that have and continue to create our society’s racialized optic—a view by which nonwhite bodies are objectified, marginalized, and destroyed—and how such a gaze might be resisted.
Throughout his work, Draper pursues these questions in relation to the works of Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter, who investigate the genesis of the racial imagination to suggest a new path forward for Christian theology.
The Jean Fortner Ward Lecture Series was initiated in 1964 to bring outstanding speakers and lectures to the Greensboro College campus to address connections between faith and higher education. This series is made possible through the generosity of the late William S. Ward of Greensboro in honor of his wife, an alumna and former trustee of the college.
Greensboro College provides a liberal arts education grounded in the traditions of the United Methodist Church and fosters the intellectual, social, and, spiritual development of all students while supporting their individual needs.
Founded in 1838 and located in downtown Greensboro, the college enrolls about 1,000 students from 29 states and territories, the District of Columbia, and seven foreign countries in its undergraduate liberal-arts program and four master’s degree programs. In addition to rigorous academics and a well-supported Honors program, the school features an 18-sport NCAA Division III athletic program and dozens of service and recreational opportunities.
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Media Contact:
Lex Alexander, Director of Communications
lex.alexander@greensboro.edu
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