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"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...
Thinking about ultimate reality is becoming increasingly transreligious. This transreligious turn follows inevitably from the discovery of divine truths in multiple traditions. Global communications bring the full range of religious ideas and practices to anyone with access to the internet. Moreover, the growth of the nones and those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious creates a pressing need for theological thinking not bound by prescribed doctrines and fixed rituals. This book responds to this vital need. The chapters in this volume each examine the claim that if the aim of theology is to know and articulate all we can about the divine reality, and if revelations, enligh...
Baby, You Are My Religion argues that American butch-femme bar culture of the mid-20th Century should be interpreted as a sacred space for its community. Before Stonewall—when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill—these bars were the only place where many could have any community at all. Baby, You are My Religion explores this community as a site of a lived corporeal theology and political space. It reveals that religious institutions such as the Metropolitan Community Church were founded in such bars, that traditional and non-traditional religious activities took place there, and that religious ceremonies such as marriage were often conducted within the bars by staff. Baby, You are My Religion examines how these bars became not only ecclesiastical sites but also provided the fertile ground for the birth of the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights before Stonewall.
Luis D. León's compelling, innovative exploration of religion in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands issues a fundamental challenge to current scholarship in the field and recharts the landscape of Chicano faith. La Llorona's Children constructs genealogies of the major traditions spanning Mexico City, East Los Angeles, and the southwestern United States: Guadalupe devotion, curanderismo, espiritualismo, and evangelical/ Pentecostal traditions. León theorizes a religious poetics that functions as an effective and subversive survival tactic akin to crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. He claims that, when examined in terms of broad categorical religious forms and intentions, these traditions are rema...
Winner of the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual Studies, presented by the American Academy of Religion 2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Magazine 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...
Charles H. Long’s groundbreaking works on Africana religious studies serve as the backdrop to With This Root about My Person. The volume features twenty-six essays by a diverse group of students and scholars of Long. Revitalizing an interpretive framework rooted in the Chicago tradition, the essays in this volume vigorously debate the nature of religions in the Americas. In doing so they wrestle with the foundations of the study of religion that emerged out of the European Enlightenment, they engage the discipline’s entrenchment in the conquest of the Americas, and they grapple with the field’s legacy of colonialism. The book demonstrates tremendous breadth and depth of scope in its skillful comparative work on colonialism, which links the religions of the Americas, Melanesia, and Africa. This seminal work is an important addition to the Religions of the Americas Series and a valuable contribution to the field to which Charles H. Long was for so long devoted.
This book presents the theological contributions of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC), a transnational body comprising fifteen Asian Catholic bishops' conferences as full members and ten associate members. The book introduces the contemporary context of Asia and represents a complete reworking of the author's approach to the FABC's way of being church and doing theology in Asia. The emphasis of the book is on the postcolonial dimensions of Asia and the challenges and implications of decolonization for shaping a postcolonial Asian church and way of theologizing. The book also addresses the challenges of religious pluralism for the FABC and the FABC's prophetic response--seeking to be a sacrament of unity and harmony amid much strife, violence, and conflict. Finally, the book discusses new challenges and possibilities for the FABC as it looks ahead. Tan explores the challenges and implications of migration, transient migration, online and virtual communities, and insider movements for shaping the future of the FABC's approach to theology.
Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad inv...