African American Christian Research Articles

Spectacular transcendence: Abundant means in the cinematic representation of African American Christianity

The transcendental style used to express the exuberant nature of African American Christian faith in the cinema has been neglected both in ethnic film studies and religious perspectives on film. This article explores the passion and spectacle of transcendence found in the cinematic images of African American religious practices. In discussing different representations of spirituality in different cultures, the authors examine the use of abundance and affirmation, as opposed to sparseness and stasis. Through analysis of Vidor's Hallelujah (1929) and Pearce's The Long Walk Home (1990), the authors construct a means of abundance that includes the spectacular, charisma, and renewal.

Book Review: African American Christian Worship

Book Review: African American Christian Worship

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access African-American Christianity Essays in History Edited by Paul E Johnson University of California Press, 1994 189 pages $35.00 cloth, $12.00 paper Will Gravely Will Gravely University of Denver Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LXIV, Issue 3, Fall 1996, Pages 702–705, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LXIV.3.702 Published: 01 October 1996

Book Review: Soul Stories: African American Christian Education

Book Review: Soul Stories: African American Christian Education

Book Review: III. Christian Life and Thought Studies: African-American Christian Worship

Book Review: III. Christian Life and Thought Studies: African-American Christian Worship

The Harlem YWCA and the Secular City, 1904-1945

The Harlem YWCA and the Secular City, 1904-1945 Judith Weisenfeld Truly, truly I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not heed them. I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. John 10: 7-11 During the first half of the twentieth century, increasing urbanization led to certain shifts in the religious lives of African Americans. Among the most significant of these changes was the increasing availability of religious options outside the traditional Baptist and Methodist denominations of African-American Christians. The rise of groups like Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, Daddy Grace's United House of Prayer for AU People, W. D. Fard and Elijah Muhammad's Lost Found Nation of Islam, among others, have captured the attention of scholars, with studies of the urban "sects and cults" and of smaller independent "storefront churches" dominating the picture of the religious scene of the urban North and of black New York, in particular. Various scholars of African-American religious history have argued that the masses of African Americans moved away from the mainline churches in favor of these "sects and cults" and in favor of the secular lures of the city. Gayraud Wilmore argues that this period saw the "deradicalization of the black church" and the "dechristianization of black radicalism," emphasizing that African Americans could no longer find in their religious institutions a drive to engage with the struggle over daily life issues facing them. If one accepts this argument, it follows that existing historiography focuses almost exclusively on the "sects" and "cults."1 In recent years, however, this traditional approach has been challenged . Studies of urban churches in locales like Harlem, Brooklyn, and Chicago have demonstrated that the influence of the new religious movements was not as great as had been previously thought. Even this new research is based largely on traditional church studies, which have tended to limit the definition of activism and obscure the contributions of women by emphasizing the institutional role of the minister. In contrast, I befieve that the Harlem Young Women's Christian Association2 was an institution © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 6 No. 3 (Fall) 1994 Judith Weisenfeld 63 through which African-American women in New York responded to the religious, social, and political pressures of the new century. The women who founded and nurtured the institution made it a venue for rehgious work and for community activism that defied narrow definitions of "religious" and "secular" and yet upheld the black church tradition of religiously grounded social engagement. While the Harlem YWCA did not have direct contact with new movement leaders like Father Divine, it was influenced by the milieu in which such movements emerged. Examining the role of institutions like the Harlem YWCA in the response to urbanization expands our vision of the urban religious scene, as well as of AfricanAmerican women's religious work in the early twentieth century. The Harlem YWCA, founded in 1905, was one of the key institutions created by African-American women in New York City in the early twentieth century and perhaps the most visible and developed of all AfricanAmerican YWCA's in the country. After spending many years in rented quarters, the branch's newly constructed faculties at 137th Street and Lenox Avenue opened in 1921. The basement housed the cafeteria and its kitchen and had a capacity of one hundred. The main floor had reception rooms, meeting rooms, classrooms, offices, and the information desk. The third floor had locker rooms, showers, and a laundry, as well as gymnasium rooms. The fourth floor housed the pool. An annex was built a number of years later to provide additional classroom space and the branch also constructed an adjacent building which housed the residence. The Harlem YWCA's faculties set a high standard for African-American YWCAs across the country. Women like Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders, Emma Ransom, and Virginia Scott, principal guiding figures for...

What Country Have I? Nineteenth-Century African-American Theological Critiques of the Nation's Birth and Destiny

In his book Prophesy Deliverance! Cornel West traces the evolution of prophetic African-American Christianity. West regards the present state of black theology to be moving in the direction of a critique of capitalist civilization. This new emphasis, he argues, was preceded by four chronological epochs: (1) the critique of slavery (mid-seventeenth century to 1863), (2) the critique of institutionalized racism (1864-1969), (3) the critique of white North American theology (1969-77), and (4) the critique of U.S. capitalism (1977 to the early 1980s).1 West's typology effectively demonstrates the historical focal points of prophetic African-American Christianity. Like all typologies, however, it exaggerates differences and de-emphasizes similarities for the purpose of comparison, leaving unattended, in this instance, the continuities that make contemporary black theologies the offspring of previous African-American analyses. In this essay I shall examine the writings of Robert Alexander Young, David Walker, and the early works of Frederick Douglass in order to illustrate the extent to which the critique of Cornel West's first epoch covered not only slavery but also the shortcomings of white North American theology and the racism that was implicit in the selective implementation of national ideals.2

Capturing the Captivity: African Americans among the Puritans

A century before Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects (1773), the British colonies had given birth to a simple indigenous American prose form: the Indian captivity (Carleton 176). Straightforward accounts of the capture, trials, and eventual liberation of Anglophone settlers, these narratives provided early colonists with their first native genre. Pamphlets celebrating the heartrending trials, exploits, and Christian forbearance of women like Mary Rowlandson or Elizabeth Hanson went through numerous editions, delivering a message that both entertained and enlightened their avid readers. As Phillips Carleton has said, to contemporary audiences these read to pieces stories were as heroic as Icelandic sagas (170,180). By the end of the eighteenth century, African Americans had discovered the utility of this earliest of American forms. As had their Puritan predecessors, captivated blacks like Briton Hammon and John Marrant told the story of their encounters with frightening, Godless attackers, torture, and death. Such genre-bound narratives, whether penned by black or white American, were designed to engage the reader in the narrator's own experience of captivity (and/or conversion), and as such served specific purposes. Both sets of narrators desired to impress their audience with their appreciation of and direct experience with the supreme being; both tales were designed to elicit sympathy for their bondage in the grasp of alien, incomprehensible captors. For African American storytellers and their white amanuenses, a signal importance of the narratives lay in their similarity to the pamphlets and broadsides that had appeared before.1 Yet unlike their immediate literary models, African Americans shared non-white status with their captors. That irony infuses the ordeals of these colonial African American Christians with a unexpressed and unacknowledged racial ambiguity. Still another paradox resounds in their adoption of a Puritan genre. As readers and writers alike moved away from the devout atmosphere of colonial New England, a divergence of intent arose between

African-American Christianity and the Postmodern Condition

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tributional or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? As it is written, for thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these we are more than conquerers through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Jesse Jackson and the Symbolic Politics of Black Christendom

This article examines the significance of the Reverend Jesse Jackson's bid for the Democratic party's presidential nomination. Jackson's candidacy represents a new use of political revivalism, an old evangelical political praxis recast in the modalities of African American Christian culture. This praxis is an aspect of American political culture that has often been overlooked because of past misunderstandings of American folk religion in general, and black Christianity in particular, as captives of an otherworldly and privatized spirituality. This article contends that black Christianity has an identifiable and coherent political style with both passive and active moods. The dominant manifestations of these moods are, respectively, political cynicism and political revivalism, which are the consequence of the correct folk perception that it is impossible to reason with the purveyors of the absurdities of racial injustice. A critical assessment of black Christianity's political symbolic capital seems appropriate.