Brian K. Blount, president emeritus of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia and Charlotte, North Carolina, serves as Candler’s 2024-2025 Alonzo L. McDonald Family Chair on The Life and Teachings of Jesus and Their Impact on Culture. In this role, Blount will present public in-person lectures on April 16 and April 23.
The McDonald Lectures are free and open to the public with registration required, and will take place in Room 252 of Candler’s Rita Anne Rollins Building. A livestream option will also be available.
Details and descriptions of Blount’s two McDonald Lectures at Candler are below.
“Before He Was White: Jesus, Mark, and the Politics of Inclusion”
Wednesday, April 16
11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Rita Anne Rollins Building Room 252
Register to attend here.
In this lecture, Blount will analyze cultural location and its impact on biblical meaning. How do readers configure Jesus when he is perceived through the ongoing and unfortunately obstreperous American dialogue about race? One of the most controversial components of this discussion has to do with Jesus’s own race and what his racial identity means for our understanding of his ministry. For what reason did God intervene in human history in the person and ministry of Jesus? And in what way does the racial lens through which we view Jesus shape the answer to that question?
“The Narrative Color of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark”
Wednesday, April 23
4:00–5:30 p.m.
Rita Anne Rollins Building Room 252
Register to attend here.
Narratively speaking, how is Jesus of Nazareth “colored” in the Gospel of Mark? This lecture will interrogate the correlation between Jesus’s actions and his racialization. Jesus’s boundary breaking activity, and the assertiveness in which he engages that activity, hint at a “color” that fits a particular racial performative.
Blount earned his MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary and his PhD from Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. Before coming to Union Presbyterian Seminary, he served for 15 years as Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Princeton Theological Seminary, and as pastor of Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church in Newport News, Virginia from 1982 to 1988.
His primary work has been in the Gospel of Mark, the Book of Revelation, and in the areas of cultural studies, biblical hermeneutics, and apocalyptic theology. He is the sole author of six books and numerous articles, and has edited, co-edited, and co-authored multiple volumes. In 2010, his commentary on the Book of Revelation was voted the 2009 top reference work by the Academy of Parish Clergy.
Blount lectures widely, and was the 2011 Beecher Lecturer at Yale Divinity School. He served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) from 2017-2018 and as president of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) from 2018-2020. He also preaches and directs adult education classes in local congregations.
The McDonald Lectures are made possible by the McDonald Agape Foundation.
About the McDonald Chair
The Alonzo L. McDonald Family Chair on the Life and Teachings of Jesus and Their Impact on Culture is supported by gifts from the McDonald Agape Foundation, founded by Alonzo L. McDonald, a longtime trustee of Emory University. The McDonald Agape Foundation “supports lectures and other public presentations that deal creatively and imaginatively with the person and teachings of Jesus as they shape and form culture.”
Recipients are given a distinguished visiting professorship, in which they speak and teach in the focused area of Jesus’s effect on culture and conversely, culture’s shaping of the figure of Jesus.
Past McDonald chair lecturers include Judge John T. Noonan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; composer Alice Parker; art historian Herbert Kessler; historian and documentary filmmaker Randall Balmer; author James Carroll; Episcopal priest and bestselling author Barbara Brown Taylor; Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Garry Wills; Jesuit priest and film professor Lloyd Baugh; United Methodist Bishop Hee-Soo Jung; and theological scholars David H. Kelsey, David F. Ford, Walter Earl Fluker, Roberto S. Goizueta, M. Shawn Copeland, Luke Timothy Johnson, and Christian Smith, among others. View a list of past chairs.