The 2018 Myron Marty Lectureship in the Arts + Humanities is Wednesday, Feb. 28, at 7 p.m. in Sussman Theater; a reception will follow.

The Rev. Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman is the recipient of the Myron Marty Lectureship for 2018 and will present, “Uncomposed Artfulness: A Black Womanist Theological Aesthetic.”

This lecture will explore the similitude between the aesthetic resistances of black church women and black feminist contemporary protest forms, with the goal of disrupting the false binary of the sacred and the secular that dares to limit divine activity to an either/or hierarchy.

An examination of black women’s ecclesial performance of “descent and recovery” as resistance and cathartic response to afro-misogynistic regulative practices in the church will be placed in conversation with the protest posture of “dying-in” that responds to anti-black state sanctioned regulative practices. The lecture will conclude with preliminary remarks on the work of the spirit (pneuma/axé) in black movement [dance] and protest, and point to the ethico-pneumatological implications of uncomposed artfulness in black church and society.

Dr. Turman is assistant professor of theology and African American religion at Yale University Divinity School. A first-career concert dancer and ordained National Baptist preacher, Dr. Turman holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and Christian ethics from Fordham University-Lincoln Center and Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. She is the author of Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon.

The Myron Marty Lectureship in the Arts + Humanities honors Myron “Mike” Marty, Drake’s dean of liberal arts from 1984 to 1986 who oversaw the integration of the College of Liberal Arts and the School of Fine Arts, continuing to serve as dean of the newly formed College of Arts and Sciences until 1994. The lectureship is made possible by a gift from the Ralph and
 Sylvia G. Green Charitable Foundation in honor of Marty’s dedication to arts and humanities scholarship and programming at the University.

— Jennifer Harvey, Professor of Religion