Religion Dispatches
…In his telling, the modern Republican Party is the party more favorable to African-Americans because Republicans led the fight against slavery and for civil rights: from the formation of the Republican Party as the “anti-slavery party” and the “election of Abraham Lincoln as the first Republican President,” to the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the passage of civil rights laws during Reconstruction, and the el…
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…anted to include a chapter on literature, music, and visual art created by African-American women. Their creative engagement with biblical texts is a part of the history of African-American biblical interpretation, but given my space limitations, there was just no way to include this chapter. I had to leave it out. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? Due to the popularity of the term “womanist” and how it paralleled with…
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…que that was once the Nation’s Temple No. 1 in Detroit. Walid notes that, “African American Muslims with no relation to the Nation of Islam are very quick to distance themselves from the Nation.” “At the same time, many African Americans feel a connection with the Nation,” added Walid, who is also the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Michigan chapter. “Maybe they were former members, or they have family members who…
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…abortions among black women. Said Lusk, “When I began to consider that the African-American population alone has declined in the past three years across the nation, I realized that we’re not procreating our own race; and that is a direct result of abortion in our communities.” During this January’s annual March for Life, Alveda King led a group of demonstrators in laying thousands of roses on the White House lawn to symbolize African-American abor…
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…and civil rights motifs in particular. But the prevailing narrative of the freedom-fighting “black church” is in many ways inconsistent with a number of African American Christians whose view of the faith is informed by Trinity Broadcasting, the Word Network, and Streaming Faith.com. Just the same, for sociologists and communication theorists who have examined the world of evangelical religious broadcasting, it is predominantly framed as the domai…
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…stication of the black spoken word tradition that extends back to the West African griot. And, more importantly, she helped to open the minds (and improve the preaching) of scores of male clergy who claimed the pulpit as their gendered birthright. Whether in Oakland, Atlanta or Russia she reached beyond the African American community and across gender lines to teach what W.E.B. DuBois suggested over a hundred years ago, “The black preacher is the…
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…ies, the blaming of black individuals is actually based on judgments about African Americans at the collective level. Politicians, pundits, and pastors, white and black alike, consistently argue that the criminal behavior of black individuals is in part attributable to deficiencies in “black culture.” Crime would not be so high in black communities, they suggest, if African Americans properly valued marriage, family, and work. By contrast, the fin…
Read More…’re very different, especially about gays. You can’t speak about this with Africans and people of Muslim countries. It’s not possible. It’s a taboo. He then went on to have this exchange with reporter Edward Pentin: But are African participants listened to in this regard? No, the majority of them [who hold these views won’t speak about them]. They’re not listened to? In Africa of course [their views are listened to], where it’s a taboo. What has c…
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…_____________________________ Who is the “We”? Yolanda Pierce Professor of African American literature and religion at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity & the African American Spiritual Narrative The frenzy of the primary election cycle is taking place during the Christian season of Lent, a period of religious observation between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday when Christians pause to reflect o…
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…’s Sowell’s “Anointed” or McWhorter’s “Elect,” the conclusion is the same: African Americans as a group are either unwitting or conscious dupes for liberal white social policy to their own detriment. Borrowing from feminist chronology, McWhorter calls wokeness “third-wave antiracism,” with the abolitionist movement and Reconstruction comprising the first-wave of anti-racism and the civil rights movement signaling the second. For McWhorter, however…
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