Brendan Jamal Thornton: Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This talk presents cosmography as an especially productive but largely unexplored area of critical inquiry into Afro-Caribbean and Black Atlantic religion. Drawing on comprehensive long-term ethnographic research with Spiritual Baptists in Trinidad and Tobago, Brendan Jamal Thornton will examine the locational metaphors orienting local creole cosmologies and considers in detail the spatial dimensions that inform their ritual logics. By diagramming the Spiritual Baptist universe and the sacred geography of Spirit that enlivens it, he will discuss how churchgoers reconcile diverse religious influences (from Africa, South Asia, Europe, and beyond) and probe for cosmographical clues to their symbolically rich but often enigmatic rites and traditions. Doing so illustrates the novel representational practices central to meaning-making for the faithful while bringing to light new analytic perspectives on the relationship between theology, cosmology, and ritual space in religions of the African diaspora.

This talk will be of special interest to scholars and students in religious studies, anthropology, history, and African American studies. A reception will follow this event.

Presented in partnership with the Religious Studies Program Roetzel Family Lecture. Co-sponsored by African and African American Studies, the Center for Premodern Studies, and the History Department.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Brendan Jamal Thornton is an anthropologist and associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His scholarship on religion and culture in the Caribbean is interdisciplinary and has been published in Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Latin American Research Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the award-winning book Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida, 2016).
 

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