Schedule

Study Questions

Edward J. Blum & Paul Harvey
The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America

  1. What was so unusual about the damaged window in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama? What meaning did people see in it?
  2. What does this book seek to show? What will it not try to show? What is the Letter of Lentulus? To see the Wales Window, follow this link.
  3. Describe the Native American encounter with Jesus. Explain the importance of iconoclasm (destruction or abhorrence of sacred images). How did Puritans describe Jesus? How did Jesus figure in English colonial interactions with Indians and Africans?
  4. Explain how visions of Jesus increased during the Great Awakening? To whom did the red blood of Jesus appeal, and why? Characterize the roles Jesus assumed to the Revolutionary generation.
  5. Visions and images of Jesus became more common in the early nineteenth century. How had he changed? Describe Indian and slave encounters with Jesus.
  6. How did Jesus figure in debates over slavery? How was Jesus' appearance contested in this era? (Note the authors' misinterpretation of the image on p. 118. In it, the whipped slave has a vision of Jesus, who points to heaven to reassure him of a place for him there. The others do not see the vision.)
  7. How did various groups use Jesus in wartime? How did blacks, Northerners, and Southerners interpret Jesus after the war?
  8. Describe the spread of images of a very white Jesus in the late nineteenth century. Who challenged the white Jesus, and how? Why did a non-Jewish Jesus become popular?
  9. Describe how Jesus was reimagined during the 1920s and 1930s. How did many blacks rebel against a white Jesus? How did Jesus appear in movies, and what was the public reaction? Explain how Indians and Harlem artists and writers viewed Jesus in this period.
  10. Describe the importance of Warner Sallman's painting of Christ. Explain the role of Jesus for both Civil Rights activists and for white supremacists. How did people react to a non-white Jesus? What were the strengths and weaknesses of the Jesus of liberation theology? How did interest in the Jewishness of Jesus make Jews uncomfortable?
  11. Describe the "chaos of liberation theologies." Why did acknowledgment that Jesus was not white not affect the continued preference for images of a white Jesus? What did Jesus look like in movies since the 1970s?
  12. I'd be happy if you could explain to me what the chapter on Jesus jokes is doing in this book. Seriously.

Last updated: November 18, 2016, 11:16 p.m.