Take Me To the Water: Black Madonnas and the Initiation of Possibility

For this colloquium, Dr. Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones will present work and discussion from her new monograph, Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology (Oxford University Press, 2025). Immaculate Misconceptions begins with the claim, Mary is Black, to ground how Christian-colonial imaginaries of salvation and identity are challenged when we rethink assumptions about race, gender, and divine significance through the lens of the Virgin Mary, and specifically, through a return to the Black Madonna. Staged as a Black feminist and womanist theological conversation, the book offers a layered journey through art, church history, theological inquiry, and Black studies to consider a theology partus sequitur ventrem—arising from the condition of the Black Mother, following the condition of the Black Madonna, and for the consideration of all those who pursue justice and life at the spiritual intersections of the world. The book questions the ‘legislative doctrine’ around our perceptions of Mary as the Mother of God, and considers how Christian collusion with colonialism, capitalism, and anti-Blackness have worked theologically to deny Blackness from the realms of the sacred. Through the lens of the art and theology of the icon, the treatise thinks through Black women’s reproductive legacies theologically, and revisits the figure of the Black Madonna as fugitive, the womb as hush harbor, birth as liturgy, and Black life as holy.