In fall 2020, TIF editor Mona Oraby invited Ahmad Greene-Hayes to cocurate a conversation at the intersection of public health, US politics, and the Movement for Black Lives featuring scholars in religious studies and theology. As Greene-Hayes writes in the introductory essay, “This forum explores the white American ritual of Black death. It also ruminates on how scholars of religion reckon with antiblackness as white religion.” New essays in this forum will be published weekly through February 2021.

This forum extends conversations previously published on The Immanent Frame, including the 2016 off-the-cuff “Religion, secularism, and Black Lives Matter” (curated by former TIF editorial board member Vincent Lloyd) and the 2020 forum “Pandemic, religion, and public life” (curated by Mona Oraby, with editorial support from TIF editorial board member Courtney Bender). To explore the SSRC’s larger series of initiatives devoted to understanding the coronavirus pandemic’s immediate impact, as well as its lasting consequences, visit https://covid19research.ssrc.org/.