J. Kameron Carter

Reliability and Validity of the Perspectives of Support From God Scale

Background:Existing spiritual support scales for use with cancer survivors focus on the support believed to come from a religious community, clergy, or health care providers. Objective:The objective of this study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of a new measure of spiritual support believed to come from God in older Christian African American cancer survivors. Methods:The Perceived Support From God Scale was administered to 317 African American cancer survivors aged 55-89 years. Psychometric evaluation involved identifying underlying factors, conducting item analysis and estimating reliability, and obtaining evidence on the relationship to other variables or the extent to which the Perceived Support From God Scale correlates with religious involvement and depression. Results:The Perceived Support From God Scale consists of 15 items in two subscales (Support From God and Gods Purpose for Me). The two subscales explained 59% of the variance. Cronbachs &agr; coefficients were .94 and .86 for the Support From God and Gods Purpose for Me subscales, respectively. Test-retest correlations were strong, supporting the temporal stability of the instrument. Pearsons correlations to an existing religious involvement and beliefs scale were moderate to strong. Subscale scores on Support From God were negatively correlated to depression. Discussion:Initial support for reliability and validity was demonstrated for the Perceived Support From God Scale. The scale captures a facet of spirituality not emphasized in other measures. Further research is needed to evaluate the scale with persons of other racial/ethnic groups and to explore the relationship of spirituality to other outcome measures.

An Unlikely Convergence: W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Barth, and the Problem of the Imperial God-Man

We suppose that we know what we are saying when we say “God.” We assign to Him the highest place in our world . . . [w]e press ourselves into proximity with Him . . . [but] [s]ecretly we are ourselves the masters in this relationship. . . . And so, when we set God upon the throne of the world, we mean by God ourselves. . . . God Himself is not acknowledged as God and what is called “God” is in fact Man.

Contemporary Black Theology: A Review Essay

Books reviewed in this article: Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation Dwight N. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over; Slave Religion and Black Theology Dwight N. Hopkins, Heart and Head: Black Theology–Past, Present, and Future

Christology, Or Redeeming Whiteness A Response to James Perkinson's Appropriation of Black Theology

In this response essay, the author argues that Perkinsons appropriation of black liberation theology as a means of articulating what white redemption in the interests of a more whole and just society in the third millennium would entail, in fact, falters because his vision assumes the strengths, but more devastatingly, the limitations of the form of black liberation theology he appropriates, limitations that come to infect Perkinsons vision, rendering it incoherent. The response essays second task is to clarify Black Theologys proper theological breakthrough and to resituate and, thus, salvage Perkinsons vision within it.

Untitled and Outdoors: Thinking with Saidiya Hartman

In some ways, critical conversations on black performance studies focus the first part of Scenes in its particular engagement with black fungibility. Arguably, the first half is black performance studies’ founding text. Even still, the authors argue that black performance studies is never not a question of ecological possibility, of being black outside in the wake of self-possession’s overdetermined white particularity. Such questions foreground Scenes’ second half. Just as Hartman elucidates how the “nonevent of emancipation insinuated by the perpetuation of the plantation system” bespeaks the state’s anti-black insistence on keeping blackness outside and in the field, the authors argue for the field’s persistence and just as well as for the question of what’s out from the field. It is in that spirit that the authors argue for the centrality of Scenes’ second half for black performance studies.

The Inglorious: With and Beyond Giorgio Agamben

The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, which continues Agamben’s interest in the history of sovereignty and the exception, brings the discourse of theology to the forefront of questions about the nature of modern political economy and governance.2 Agamben’s claim is that theology has left its indelible signature on and therefore deeply animates modern life. But how? In what follows I want to track, even if only schematically, Agamben’s argument, though I want to engage it by recasting it at its limit. That limit has everything to do with race as the repressed within Agamben’s discourse. More specifically, I want to recast Agamben’s argument at the limits of racialization. To speak of racialization (and not just of the potentially more static notion of race) is to speak of the social and historical processes of Western embodiment or of modern globality’s ties to the body. To speak of racialization is to address the question of how the historically instituted, colonial relation of ‘European’/‘non-European’—again, the repressed in Agamben’s discourse—came to be, how it is maintained, and how it is reproduced and repressed in its very production.3 And finally,