Religion, Race, and Ethnicity
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Through their constant television broadcasts, mass video distributions, and printed publications, African American religious broadcasters have a seemingly ubiquitous presence in popular culture. They are on par with popular entertainers and athletes in the African American community as cultural icons even as they are criticized by others for taking advantage of the devout in order to subsidize their lavish lifestyles.For these reasons questions abound. Do televangelists proclaim the message of the gospel or a message of greed? Do they represent the «authentic» voice of the black church or the Christian Right in blackface? Does the phenomenon reflect orthodox «Christianity» or ethnocentric «Americaninity» wrapped in religious language? Watch This! seeks to move beyond such polarizing debates by critically delving into the dominant messages and aesthetic styles of African American televangelists and evaluating their ethical implications.
The Methodist Unification
In the early part of the twentieth century, Methodists were seen by many Americans as the most powerful Christian group in the country. Ulysses S. Grant is rumored to have said that during his presidency there were three major political parties in the U.S., if you counted the Methodists. The Methodist Unification focuses on the efforts among the Southern and Northern Methodist churches to create a unified national Methodist church, and how their plan for unification came to institutionalize racism and segregation in unprecedented ways. How did these Methodists conceive of what they had just formed as “united” when members in the church body were racially divided?Moving the history of racial segregation among Christians beyond a simplistic narrative of racism, Morris L. Davis shows that Methodists in the early twentieth century — including high-profile African American clergy — were very much against racial equality, believing that mixing the races would lead to interracial marriages and threaten the social order of American society. The Methodist Unification illuminates the religious culture of Methodism, Methodists' self-identification as the primary carriers of "American Christian Civilization," and their influence on the crystallization of whiteness during the Jim Crow Era as a legal category and cultural symbol.
The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York
It was from the pulpit of the Riverside Church that Martin Luther King, Jr., first publicly voiced his opposition to the Vietnam War, that Nelson Mandela addressed U.S. church leaders after his release from prison, and that speakers as diverse as Cesar Chavez, Jesse Jackson, Desmond Tutu, Fidel Castro, and Reinhold Niebuhr lectured church and nation about issues of the day. The greatest of American preachers have served as senior minister, including Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert J. McCracken, Ernest T. Campbell, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and James A. Forbes, Jr., and at one time the New York Times printed reports of each Sunday's sermon in its Monday morning edition. For seven decades the church has served as the premier model of Protestant liberalism in the United States. Its history represents the movement from white Protestant hegemony to a multiracial and multiethnic church that has been at the vanguard of social justice advocacy, liberation theologies, gay and lesbian ministries, peace studies, ethnic and racial dialogue, and Jewish-Christian relations. A collaborative effort by a stellar team of scholars, The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York offers a critical history of this unique institution on Manhattan's Upper West Side, including its cultural impact on New York City and beyond, its outstanding preachers, and its architecture, and assesses the shifting fortunes of religious progressivism in the twentieth century.
New York Glory
Is New York a post-secular city? Massive immigration and cultural changes have created an increasingly complex social landscape in which religious life plays a dynamic role. Yet the magnitude of religion's impact on New York's social life has gone unacknowledged. New York Glory gathers together for the first time the best research on religion in contemporary New York City. It includes contributors from every major research project on religion in New York to provide a comprehensive look at the current state of religion in the city. Moving beyond broad surveys into specific case studies of communities and institutions, it provides a window onto the diversity of religious life in New York. From Italian Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, and Russian Jews to Zen Buddhists, Rastafarians, and Pentecostal Latinas, New York Glory both captures the richness of religious life in New York City and provides an important foundation for our understanding of the current and future shape of religion in America.
From Africa to America
Upon arrival in the United States, most African immigrants are immediately subsumed under the category “black.” In the eyes of most Americans—and more so to American legal and social systems—African immigrants are indistinguishable from all others, such as those from the Caribbean whose skin color they share. Despite their growing presence in many cities and their active involvement in sectors of American economic, social, and cultural life, we know little about them. In From Africa to America , Moses O. Biney offers a rare full-scale look at an African immigrant congregation, the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in New York (PCGNY). Through personal stories, notes from participant observation, and interviews, Biney explores the complexities of the social, economic, and cultural adaptation of this group, the difficult moral choices they have to make in order to survive, and the tensions that exist within their faith community. Most notably, through his compelling research Biney shows that such congregations are more than mere “ethnic enclaves,” or safe havens from American social and cultural values. Rather, they help maintain the essential balance between cultural acclimation and ethnic preservation needed for these new citizens to flourish.
Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought
Black theology tends to be a theology about no-body. Though one might assume that black and womanist theology have already given significant attention to the nature and meaning of black bodies as a theological issue, this inquiry has primarily taken the form of a focus on issues relating to liberation, treating the body in abstract terms rather than focusing on the experiencing of a material, fleshy reality. By focusing on the body as a physical entity and not just a metaphorical one, Pinn offers a new approach to theological thinking about race, gender, and sexuality.According to Pinn, the body is of profound theological importance. In this first text on black theology to take embodiment as its starting point and its goal, Pinn interrogates the traditional source materials for black theology, such as spirituals and slave narratives, seeking to link them to materials such as photography that highlight the theological importance of the body. Employing a multidisciplinary approach spanning from the sociology of the body and philosophy to anthropology and art history, Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought pushes black theology to the next level.
Deeper Shades of Purple
Womanist approaches to the study of religion and society have contributed much to our understanding of Black religious life, activism, and women's liberation. Deeper Shades of Purple explores the achievements of this movement over the past two decades and evaluates some of the leading voices and different perspectives within this burgeoning field. Deeper Shades of Purple brings together a who's who of scholars in the study of Black women and religion who view their scholarship through a womanist critical lens. The contributors revisit Alice Walker's definition of womanism for its viability for the approaches to discourses in religion of Black women scholars. Whereas Walker has defined what it means to be womanist, these contributors define what it means to practice womanism, and illuminate how womanism has been used as a vantage point for the theoretical orientations and methodological approaches of Black women scholar-activists.Contributors: Karen Baker-Fletcher, Katie G. Cannon, M. Shawn Copeland, Kelly Brown Douglas, Carol B. Duncan, Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, Rachel Elizabeth Harding, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Melanie L. Harris, Diana L. Hayes, Dwight N. Hopkins, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Kwok Pui-Lan, Daisy L. Machado, Debra Majeed, Anthony B. Pinn, Rosetta Ross, Letty M. Russell, Shani Settles, Dianne M. Stewart, Raedorah Stewart-Dodd, Emilie M. Townes, Traci C. West, and Nancy Lynne Westfield.
Daddy Grace
Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace founded the United House of Prayer for All People in Wareham, Massachusetts, in 1919. This charismatic church has been regarded as one of the most extreme Pentecostal sects in the country. In addition to attention-getting maneuvers such as wearing purple suits with glitzy jewelry, purchasing high profile real estate, and conducting baptisms in city streets with a fire hose, the flamboyant Grace reputedly accepted massive donations from his poverty-stricken followers and used the money to live lavishly. It was assumed by many that Grace was the charismatic glue that held his church together, and that once he was gone the institution would disintegrate. Instead, following his 1960 death there was a period of confusion, restructuring, and streamlining. Today the House of Prayer remains an active church with a national membership in the tens of thousands. Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer seriously examines the religious nature of the House of Prayer, the dimensions of Grace’s leadership strategies, and the connections between his often ostentatious acts and the intentional infrastructure of the House of Prayer. Furthermore, woven through the text are analyses of the race, class, and gender issues manifest in the House of Prayer structure under Grace’s aegis.Marie W. Dallam here offers both a religious history of the House of Prayer as an institution and an intellectual history of its colorful and enigmatic leader.
Beyond Christianity
Beyond Christianity draws on rich ethnographic work in a Religious Science church in Oakland, California, to illuminate the ways a group of African Americans has adapted a religion typically thought of as white to fit their needs and circumstances.This predominantly African American congregation is an anomalous phenomenon for both Religious Science and African American religious studies. It stands at the intersection of New Thought doctrine, characterized by personal empowerment teachings,and a culturally familiar liturgical style reminiscent of Black Pentecostals and Black Spiritualists. This group challenges oversimplified concepts of the Black church experience and broadens the concept of Black religion outside the boundaries of Christianity—raising questions about what it means to be an African American congregation, and about the nature of blackness itself. Beyond Christianity adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Black religion.
American Muslim Women
African American Muslims and South Asian Muslim immigrants are two of the largest ethnic Muslim groups in the U.S. Yet there are few sites in which African Americans and South Asian immigrants come together, and South Asians are often held up as a “model minority” against African Americans. However, the American ummah, or American Muslim community, stands as a unique site for interethnic solidarity in a time of increased tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants.This ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago and Atlanta explores how Islamic ideals of racial harmony and equality create hopeful possibilities in an American society that remains challenged by race and class inequalities. The volume focuses on women who, due to gender inequalities, are sometimes more likely to move outside of their ethnic Muslim spaces and interact with other Muslim ethnic groups in search of gender justice. American Muslim Women explores the relationships and sometimes alliances between African Americans and South Asian immigrants, drawing on interviews with a diverse group of women from these two communities. Karim investigates what it means to negotiate religious sisterhood against America's race and class hierarchies, and how those in the American Muslim community both construct and cross ethnic boundaries. American Muslim Women reveals the ways in which multiple forms of identity frame the American Muslim experience, in some moments reinforcing ethnic boundaries, and at other times, resisting them.