CARMICHAEL-WALLING LECTURES
When: 4 and 7:30 p.m. CST Thursday, Nov. 12
Lecturer: Dr. Vincent L. Wimbush, founding director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures
Theme: Scriptures and Race
Lectures: 4 p.m. “Mystic Hieroglyphics of the Flesh”: Scripturalization as Racialization; 7:30 p.m. “Even the Bible Was Made Over to Suit Our Vivid Imagination”: Scripturalizing the Human
Access: Contact csart@acu.edu to RSVP for this Zoom webinar event

Dr. Vincent L. Wimbush, founding director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures, will speak twice Thursday, Nov. 12, as guest lecturer for this year’s Carmichael-Walling Lectures.

The 34th annual event, hosted by the Center for the Study of Ancient Religious Texts (CSART) at Abilene Christian University, will be presented as a Zoom webinar this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To sign up for free access to the webinar, email csart@acu.edu Theme of the lectures will be “Scriptures and Race.”

Wimbush will present two lectures, at 4 and 7:30 p.m. CST. The 4 p.m. lecture will be on  “Mystic Hieroglyphics of the Flesh”: Scripturalization as Racialization. The 7:30 p.m. lecture is titled “Even the Bible Was Made Over to Suit Our Vivid Imagination”: Scripturalizing the Human”.

The following news release is from CSART:

In two lectures and subsequent discussion, Wimbush will challenge the audience to look at “scriptures” not in terms of mere texts or the exegesis of such, but as a shorthand for a complex phenomenon involving social formation. Like all such phenomena, there is a mix of horrendous and not so horrendous effects and consequences, both historical and ongoing. The concept of scripturalization entails a type of violence being done, but we will address possibilities for disrupting the violence, if not altogether overcoming it, seeking a degree of agency in the process.

To clarify the importance of this theoretical and analytical work, we will draw on the history of Black people in the modern world in order to model alternatives to traditional scholarship in biblical studies and related fields, with implications for all.