You Tube Theology

2018 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion November 17 Denver, Colorado David P. Gushee is the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University in Georgia, where he has the privilege of teaching both college and seminary students. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, dozens of book chapters, and thousands of opinion pieces. His most important books include Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: Genocide and Moral Obligation, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, The Sacredness of Human Life: Why an Ancient Biblical Idea is Key to the World's Future, Changing Our Mind: The Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians, and Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism. Working with Colin Holtz, he has just completed Moral Leadership for a Divided Age: Fourteen Leaders Who Dared to Change the World, to be released in October 2018. Raised Roman Catholic in northern Virginia, in high school Gushee wandered into a Southern Baptist church where he had a born-again experience that entirely changed the course of his life. Pursuing Jesus and the pastorate, he attended Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, serving in student ministry and eventually becoming an ordained Southern Baptist minister. In seminary, however, studying with the late Glen Stassen, Gushee also discovered the discipline of Christian ethics, which he pursued with a doctorate at Union Theological Seminary in New York. For thirty-five years, Gushee attempted to be both a Southern Baptist Christian, and an evangelical Christian, while also serving faithfully as a Christian ethicist in the tradition he had learned at Union Seminary. He became well-known on the evangelical side of the Christian fence, writing and lecturing globally and gaining influence as one of progressive evangelicalism's most important moral thinkers. He also developed a following as a public theologian, with extensive media work and opinion writing in such places as Beliefnet, Christianity Today, Huffington Post, Baptist News Global, and Religion News Service. His scholarship, leadership, and activism against US-sponsored torture in the George W. Bush years drew national attention. In 2014, Gushee fell from the evangelical firmament after publishing Changing Our Mind, an analysis of the LGBTQ question within Christianity that ended with his articulating a call for full and unequivocal inclusion, a position which he believed reflected core Christian ethical norms that he had applied to other questions throughout his career. Gushee's spiritual and intellectual reflection since 2015 has been deeply affected by his disillusionment with white American evangelicalism and his attempt to consider where he has been, what he has learned, and where he goes from here. In this presidential address, Gushee will perform "religion in public" in a confessional vein. Beginning with the claim that the moral credibility of white American evangelicalism stands in ruins, that he has been complicit, and that white evangelicalism lacks the resources within itself to address its moral collapse, Gushee turns to historic and contemporary African-American intellectual resources, seeking within them an answer to two basic questions: What went wrong with white American (evangelical) Christianity? Where might redemption be found? Laurie Louise Patton, Middlebury College, presiding Panelists: David P. Gushee, Mercer University