Download or read book God Harlem U S A written by Jill Watts and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-01-10 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did an African-American man born in a ghetto in 1879 rise to such religious prominence that his followers addressed letters to him simply "God, Harlem U.S.A."? Using hitherto unknown materials, Jill Watts portrays the life and career of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing religious leaders, Father Divine. Starting as an itinerant preacher, Father Divine built an unprecedented movement that by the 1930s had attracted followers across the nation and around the world. As his ministry grew, so did the controversy surrounding his enormous wealth, flamboyant style, and committed "angels"—black and white, rich and poor alike. Here for the first time a full account of Father Divine's childhood and early years challenges previous contentions that he was born into a sharecropping family in the deep South. While earlier biographers have concentrated on Father Divine's social and economic programs, Watts focuses on his theology, which gives new meaning to secular activities that often appeared contradictory. Although much has been written about Father Divine, God, Harlem U.S.A. finally provides a balanced and intimate account of his life's work.
Download or read book Daddy Grace written by Marie W. Dallam and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A History of Religion in America written by Bryan Le Beau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Religion in America: From the End of the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century provides comprehensive coverage of the history of religion in America from the end of the American Civil War to religion in post 9/11 America. The volume explores major religious groups in the United States and examines the following topics: The aftermath of the American Civil War Immigration’s impact on American religion The rise of the social gospel The fundamentalist response Religion in Cold War America The 60’s counterculture and the backlash Religion in Post-9/11 America Chronologically arranged and integrating various religious developments into a coherent historical narrative, this book also contains useful chapter summaries and review questions. Designed for undergraduate religious studies and history students A History of Religion in America provides a substantive and comprehensive introduction to the complexity of religion in American history.
Download or read book Celibacies written by Benjamin Kahan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.
Download or read book Race Nation and Religion in the Americas written by Henry Goldschmidt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of new essays exploring the complex and unstable articulations of race and religion. Drawing on original research, the authors investigate how race and religion have defined global relations, shaped the everyday lives of individuals and communities and how communities use religion to contest the power of racism.
Download or read book Living in the Future written by Victoria W. Wolcott and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Victoria W. Wolcott argues that utopianism is the little-appreciated base of the visionary worldview that informed the prime movers of the Civil Rights Movement. Idealism and pragmatism, not utopianism, are what tend to come to mind when we think about the motivating philosophies of the movement. It's well-known that many of its iconic moments were carefully executed products of planning, not passion alone. But Wolcott holds that pragmatism and idealism alike were grounded in nothing less than intensely utopian thought. Key figures from Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott to Marjorie Penney and Howard Thurman shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was, Wolcott shows, both specifically utopian and precisely engaged in changing the existing world. Casting mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in the light of utopianism ultimately allows us to see the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today"--
Download or read book God in Gotham written by Jon Butler and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism. In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity's rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community. Yet fears of religion's demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem's storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan's young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island's booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth. God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than floundered in it. Far from the world of "disenchantment" that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.
Download or read book African American Women and Christian Activism written by Judith Weisenfeld and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Between the Civil War and World War II, Catholic charities evolved from volunteer and local origins into a centralized and professionally trained workforce that played a prominent role in the development of American welfare. Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown document the extraordinary efforts of Catholic volunteers to care for Catholic families and resist Protestant and state intrusions at the local level, and they show how these initiatives provided the foundation for the development of the largest private system of social provision in the United States."--Jacket.
Download or read book Getting What We Need Ourselves written by Jennifer Jensen Wallach and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with an examination of West African food traditions during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and ending with a discussion of black vegan activism in the twenty-first century, Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life tells a multi-faceted food story that goes beyond the well-known narrative of southern-derived “soul food” as the predominant form of black food expression. While this book considers the provenance and ongoing cultural resonance of emblematic foods such as greens and cornbread, it also examines the experiences of African Americans who never embraced such foods or who rejected them in search of new tastes and new symbols that were less directly tied to the past of plantation slavery. This book tells the story of generations of cooks and eaters who worked to create food habits that they variously considered sophisticated, economical, distinctly black, all-American, ethical, and healthful in the name of benefiting the black community. Significantly, it also chronicles the enduring struggle of impoverished eaters who worried far more about having enough to eat than about what particular food filled their plates. Finally, it considers the experiences of culinary laborers, whether enslaved, poorly paid domestic servants, tireless entrepreneurs, or food activists and intellectuals who used their knowledge and skills to feed and educate others, making a lasting imprint on American food culture in the process. Throughout African American history, food has both been used as a tool of empowerment and wielded as a weapon. Beginning during the era of slavery, African American food habits have often served as a powerful means of cementing the bonds of community through the creation of celebratory and affirming shared rituals. However, the system of white supremacy has frequently used food, or often the lack of it, as a means to attempt to control or subdue the black community. This study demonstrates that African American eaters who have worked to creative positive representations of black food practices have simultaneously had to confront an elaborate racist mythology about black culinary inferiority and difference. Keeping these tensions in mind, empty plates are as much a part of the history this book sets out to narrate as full ones, and positive characterizations of black foodways are consistently put into dialogue with distorted representations created by outsiders. Together these stories reveal a rich and complicated food history that defies simple stereotypes and generalizations.
Download or read book African American Religious Thought written by Cornel West and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 1084 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Believing that African American religious studies has reached a crossroads, Cornel West and Eddie Glaude seek, in this landmark anthology, to steer the discipline into the future. Arguing that the complexity of beliefs, choices, and actions of African Americans need not be reduced to expressions of black religion, West and Glaude call for more careful reflection on the complex relationships of African American religious studies to conceptions of class, gender, sexual orientation, race, empire, and other values that continue to challenge our democratic ideals.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology written by Katie G. Cannon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named an Honor Book for Nonfiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association African American theology has a long and important history. With modern roots in the civil rights movements of the 1960s, African American theology has gone beyond issues of justice and social transformation to participate in broader dialogues of theological inquiry. The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology brings together leading scholars in the field to offer a critical and comprehensive analysis of this theological tradition in its many forms and contexts. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this Oxford Handbook examines the nature, structures, and functions of African American Theology. The volume surveys the field by highlighting its sources, doctrines, internal debates, current challenges, and future prospects in order to present key topics related to the wider palette of Black Religion in a sustained scholarly format. This formative collection presents current scholarship on African American Theology and scripture, eschatology, Christology, womanist theology, sexuality, ontology, the global economy, and much more. The contributors represent a diverse set of faith perspectives, adding to the layered discourses within the volume. These essays further important discussions on the pressing debates and challenges that shape black and womanist theologies.
Download or read book Bishop Charles H Mason in the Age of Jim Crow written by Elton H. Weaver and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow profiles the life and career of Charles Harrison Mason. Mason was the founder of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which from its Memphis roots, grew into the most significant black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, with profound theological and political ramifications for poor and working-class black Memphians. Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow is grounded in the history of the Jim Crow era. The book traces the origins of COGIC in Memphis; it reveals just how Mason’s new black Pentecostal denomination grew, gained social and political power, and earned a permanent place in Memphis’s black religious pantheon. This book tells how a son of slaves transformed a rural migrant movement into an urban phenomenon, how unusual religious demonstrations exemplified infrapolitical religious protests, and how these rituals of resistance changed black lives and helped strengthen and sustain blacks fighting for freedom in segregated Memphis. The author reveals why Charles H. Mason was an important pre-civil rights religious leader who laid the groundwork for integrated churches.
Download or read book Hirschfeld s Harlem written by Al Hirschfeld and published by Applause Theatre & Cinema. This book was released on 2004 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawings by the famed illustrator depict the music, theater, performers, culture, and moods of Harlem, accompanied by commentary by such notables as Savion Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Howard Dodson, Rev. James A. Forbes Jr., Chester Higgins Jr., Geoffrey Holder, Quincy Jones, Carmen de Lavallade, Audra McDonald, Arthur Mitchell, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Albert L. Murray, Charles B. Rangel, Bobby Short, George C. Wolfe, and Cicely Tyson.
Download or read book Langston s Salvation written by Wallace D. Best and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual Studies, presented by the American Academy of Religion A new perspective on the role of religion in the work of Langston Hughes Langston's Salvation offers a fascinating exploration into the religious thought of Langston Hughes. Known for his poetry, plays, and social activism, the importance of religion in Hughes’ work has historically been ignored or dismissed. This book puts this aspect of Hughes work front and center, placing it into the wider context of twentieth-century American and African American religious cultures. Best brings to life the religious orientation of Hughes work, illuminating how this powerful figure helped to expand the definition of African American religion during this time. Best argues that contrary to popular perception, Hughes was neither an avowed atheist nor unconcerned with religious matters. He demonstrates that Hughes’ religious writing helps to situate him and other black writers as important participants in a broader national discussion about race and religion in America. Through a rigorous analysis that includes attention to Hughes’s unpublished religious poems, Langston’s Salvation reveals new insights into Hughes’s body of work, and demonstrates that while Hughes is seen as one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance, his writing also needs to be understood within the context of twentieth-century American religious liberalism and of the larger modernist movement. Combining historical and literary analyses with biographical explorations of Langston Hughes as a writer and individual, Langston’s Salvation opens a space to read Langston Hughes’ writing religiously, in order to fully understand the writer and the world he inhabited.
Download or read book New World A Coming written by Judith Weisenfeld and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute "Ethiopian Hebrew." "God did not make us Negroes," declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or raceless children of God. Rejecting conventional American racial classification, many black southern migrants and immigrants from the Caribbean embraced these alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and collective future, thereby reshaping the black religious and racial landscape. Focusing on the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and a number of congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay not only in the new religious opportunities membership provided, but also in the novel ways they formulated a religio-racial identity. Arguing that members of these groups understood their religious and racial identities as divinely-ordained and inseparable, the book examines how this sense of self shaped their conceptions of their bodies, families, religious and social communities, space and place, and political sensibilities. Weisenfeld draws on extensive archival research and incorporates a rich array of sources to highlight the experiences of average members."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History written by Paul Harvey and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first guide to American religious history from colonial times to the present, this anthology features twenty-two leading scholars speaking on major themes and topics in the development of the diverse religious traditions of the United States. These include the growth and spread of evangelical culture, the mutual influence of religion and politics, the rise of fundamentalism, the role of gender and popular culture, and the problems and possibilities of pluralism. Geared toward general readers, students, researchers, and scholars, The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History provides concise yet broad surveys of specific fields, with an extensive glossary and bibliographies listing relevant books, films, articles, music, and media resources for navigating different streams of religious thought and culture. The collection opens with a thematic exploration of American religious history and culture and follows with twenty topical chapters, each of which illuminates the dominant questions and lines of inquiry that have determined scholarship within that chapter's chosen theme. Contributors also outline areas in need of further, more sophisticated study and identify critical resources for additional research. The glossary, "American Religious History, A-Z," lists crucial people, movements, groups, concepts, and historical events, enhanced by extensive statistical data.
Download or read book Lived Theology written by Charles Marsh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Written as a two-year collaboration of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, this volume offers a series of illustrations and styles that distinguish Lived Theology in the broader conversation with other major approaches to the religious interpretation of embodied life."--Jacket.
