Religion Dispatches
…s celebration of community and culture was created to reaffirm and restore African Americans “rootedness in African culture” and the “bonds between us as a people.” Each night African Americans are to celebrate one of the seven principles and values inherited from the African communitarian philosophy of Kawaida. In hopes of neither offending Kwanzaa celebrants nor my phenotype, I must confess that I have always been indifferent about this holiday…
Read More
…to draw sweeping conclusions about churchgoing and recidivism rates among African-American and Latino men, arguing that faith plays a key role in helping them “flourish.” In a recent article in The Atlantic, entitled “How the Church Allows Black Men to Thrive,” the authors cite the higher levels of religiosity among African-American men, claiming that “compared to their less religious peers, these 6 million or so black men are significantly more…
Read More
…ica. Gifford is right in pointing out that we cannot adequately understand African governance outside neo-patrimonialism, a system built on loyalty where a superior ensures the security of a subordinate in exchange for political support. With evangelicalism, there is no consensus even in the West on how to correctly delineate who the evangelicals are in relation to the fundamentalists and Pentecostals. Defining evangelicalism in the African contex…
Read More…p Islamophobia. The racism isn’t as blatant as opposing Brown because he’s African American. And, of course, they’ll point the African Americans they do support. But the real hysteria about “outsiders” is about race. What it comes down to is the tea party doesn’t like a group facilitating (and according to her own report we are talking about walking precincts and giving rides to the polls to legitimate voters) turnout among African Americans. A ha…
Read More
…the African Orthodox Church, a denomination that began in the 1920s as an African-American split from the Episcopal church. The African Orthodox denomination continues in operation, albeit in relatively small numbers. The Coltrane church does not, as some might imagine, “worship” John Coltrane any more than a church called St. Mark’s worships Mark. The African Orthodox church officially canonized Coltrane, so the designation of “Saint John Coltra…
Read More
…ment pretexts, or to moral infirmity in a pre-earthly life by the souls of Africans and African-Americans, and other racist apologetic mental gymnastics exemplified in Bott’s statement to the Post—persist and circulate, generally unquestioned and unchallenged. For its part, the LDS Church has never authoritatively addressed racist theologies developed in defense of the ban in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, it has attempted t…
Read More…ss successful at portraying the different “racializations” of members from African countries and African Americans. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? First, it is a general assumption by many in the white community that we have moved “beyond” race. The recent anger at Barack Obama’s minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, suggests a real obliviousness by many whites about the deeply entrenched and continuing effects of racism i…
Read More…ace gauge racism is in terms of life chances and outcomes. Is a child born African American in this country statistically more likely to experience different life outcomes than a child born into a non-African-American Mormon family? (Thinking about how religion and race intersect for black Mormons would add a new wrinkle to the analysis.) Analytically, just by the numbers, just for the fact of being born black, a child is statistically more likely…
Read More
…important to say!” As W.E.B. DuBois reminds us in The Souls of Black Folk, African-American spirituality has often been treated as a problem by Western society. The Black indigenous forms of Christianity, Islam and Judaism that developed during both the Antebellum and post-Emancipation period placed the experiences of Black folks at their center, much to the chagrin of both African-American assimilationists and non-Black believers. Whether detract…
Read More
…ironically, their protests display episcopal collegiality and ecclesial decentralization that they have traditionally staunchly resisted. This collegial and decentralized perspective is favored by Pope Francis and, in fact, called for by Vatican II. So, for bishops conferences to be debating and even ignoring a papal document is, in a sense, progress. For bishops to understand they have a certain co-responsibility for the church, and that the pap…
Read More