Study Questions
Edward J. Blum & Paul Harvey
The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America
- What was so unusual about the damaged window in the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama? What meaning did people see in it?
- 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.
- 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?
-
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.
-
Visions and images of Jesus became more common in the early nineteenth
century. How had he changed? Describe Indian and slave encounters with
Jesus.
- 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.)
- How did various groups use Jesus in wartime? How did blacks,
Northerners, and Southerners interpret Jesus after the war?
- 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?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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?
- 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.