Buckman Chair Installation and Inaugural Lecture by Rev. Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D.

“They Do Not Know It and Do Not Want to Know It”: Racial Ignorance, James Baldwin, and the Authenticity of Christian Ethics
The Rev. Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D.
James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics

Writing in the 1960s, James Baldwin declared that a central obstacle to achieving racial justice was the racial majority’s willful and cultivated ignorance of the situation facing people of color. Yet this kind of “ignorance” has not been critically examined in Catholic moral theology. This lecture explains the conceptual and race-based obstacles that hindered this engagement and the social consequences of this omission. It will also detail how key concepts in Christian ethical reflection will have to be reconfigured by the faith community and its scholars if they are to answer Baldwin’s challenge and become an effective force for racial justice in the United States.

A reception in the Keating Hall Rotunda immediately follows the lecture.

RSVP online by Tuesday, February 13, 2018.