Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology

’Mary is Black.’ Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology begins with this claim to challenge how Christian thinking of salvation, possibility, and identity are challenged when we rethink assumptions about race, gender, and divine significance through the lens of the Virgin Mary, and specifically, through a return to the Black Madonna.

A layered journey is offered through art, theology, and culture to consider a theology arising from the condition of the Black Mother, a theology following the condition of the Black Madonna, a theology for the consideration of all those who pursue justice and life at the spiritual intersections of the world, questioning the ’legislative doctrine’ around our perceptions of Mary as the mother of God, and extending conversations forward to consider the what else of life.

Immaculate Misconceptions considers how Christian collusion with colonialism, capitalism, and anti-Blackness have worked theologically to deny Blackness from the realms of the sacred. Through the lens of art and icon, the treatise thinks through Black women’s reproductive legacies, and revisits the figure of the Black Madonna, as a necessary return to the womb as hush harbor, birth as liturgy, and Black life as holy.

Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones, Assistant Professor of Theology and African and African Diaspora Studies, Boston College

Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones is Assistant Professor of Theology and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, MA.