2013 Conference
June 4-6, 2013 | University of North Carolina | Chapel Hill, NC
Lynching, Scapegoating & Actual Innocence
Rev. Dr. Julia Robinson
Rev. Dr. Julia Robinson teaches at UNC Charlotte. She uses Girard in her courses, has presented twice at COV&R conferences on the theme of lynching, and is recognized as a significant voice applying mimetic theory in the traumatic area of race in the United States. Her forthcoming book is entitled Race, Religion, and the Pulpit: The Making of Urban Detroit.
Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas
Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas teaches at Goucher College in Baltimore. She has published numerous books focusing on the black body experience, and she uses Girard as one of the few white thinkers able to illuminate this experience. She has authored What’s Faith Got To Do With It?: Black Bodies/Christian Souls (2005), which explores the black body as the key reality where struggle for black identity, faith and freedom takes place, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (1999), The Black Christ (1993).
Experience more of Rev. Dr. Julia Robinson Moore’s work — watch our recording of her Quarterly Speaker Series presentation on the Theology & Peace YouTube channel.
Christine Mumma
Christine Mumma teaches at UNC's School of Law and is executive director of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence (nccai.org), which coordinates the work of North Carolina law school Innocence Projects. She has championed multiple criminal justice reform initiatives, and represented several North Carolina citizens who have been exonerated after serving years in prison for crimes they did not commit.
Vince Bantu
Vince Bantu, Christian Community Development Association (CCDA). Since 2004 Vince has led conference workshops, participated in the Emerging Leaders Cohort, and is a founding member and contributing author of CCDA’s Theological Committee. Vince has a ThM in Church History from Princeton Theological Seminary and an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Center for Urban Ministerial Education. He and his wife Diana pastor DC Shalom Church, a small, multiethnic fellowship in DC.
“In the Hebrew Bible, there is clearly a dynamic that moves in the direction of the rehabilitation of the victims, but it is not a cut-and-dried thing. Rather, it is a process under way, a text in travail; it is not a chronologically progressive process, but a struggle that advances and retreats. I see the Gospels as the climactic achievement of that trend, and therefore as the essential text in the cultural upheaval of the modern world.”
—René Girard, Violent Origins
Rev. Paul Nuechterlein is Senior Pastor at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Portage, Michigan. He has been applying Rene Girard’s mimetic theory to scripture since 1992, and in 2000 he launched the website Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary. He has presented numerous workshops on mimetic theory and scripture. Paul is passionate about dismantling racism, especially through the work of Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training.