God in Our Image: Race Reflected in the Black Christ of Daule

This paper examines El Cristo Negro de Daule in the context of theological aesthetics. It explains El Cristo Negro as a religious symbol that evokes asombro, or wonder, that then dismantles the illusion of control and omnipotence in us as described by Cecilia González-Andrieu’s Bridge to Wonder: Art as the Gospel of Beauty. As a religious symbol that reconstructs perceptions of the world and one another, this is a paper influenced heavily by liberation theology. The paper also analyzes the impact of a White Christ on Black peoples of the U.S, and it operates within the framework of Black Christology and Critical Race Theory (CRT).