African American Preaching Research Articles

Grave Preaching: Homiletical Violence in the Face of Grief

The myth of the African American's ability to separate ourselves from our pain was born amidst the unprecedented violence and innumerable deaths of the Transatlantic Slave trade. It continued throughout the three centuries of enslavement of people of African descent in America. In America, there is still a societal, as well as medical, expectation, that African Americans avoid deep acknowledgment of trauma, grief, and mourning. In an ecology of massive and ongoing health disparities (resulting in death) and sustained violence against African Americans, some African American preachers, and the churches they pastor, abide treatment of grief as a matter that should be given limited attention and moved beyond quickly. A combination of historical research and qualitative ethnography was used to identify past and present-day practices. A series of in-person interviews provided revelations as well as affirmation of the impact of these preaching and pastoral practices. Among African Americans interviewed and studied who experience preaching and the type of pastoral care that supports “a theology of expedient mourning,” many shared that their church did not provide the space and support needed to adequately grieve their losses. My research revealed how the notion of truncated bereavement has influenced harsher realities beyond the walls of the church, even to the hallways of corporate America. A modified proclamation about the importance of adequate support during individual as well as communal grief and mourning is needed for survivors to (re)consider the African American church a place of refuge and healing.

The Soul of Black Preaching

This article explores the richness of African American preaching. It contends that preaching is central in African American worship and interweaves aspects of African traditional religion. It reviews certain theological and rhetorical characteristics of Black preaching, such as poetic storytelling, call and response, rhythm, and musical sound. This article further contends that the soul of Black preaching is both an art and a discipline. It is also a historical, life-giving, and empowering entity, reflecting a rich tapestry of culture, communication, inspiration, faith, and empowerment within the African American religious tradition.

Preaching Outside the Temple: On the Literary Witness of James Baldwin as the Word Made Public

It was the late Bishop Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, former minister of the First Church of God in Christ of Brooklyn, New York, who said of the late famed novelist/essayist James Baldwin that “he was America’s inside eye on the Black Holiness and Pentecostal Churches”. Though Baldwin admitted that the culture and ethos of the African-American Pentecostal church were “highly significant and indelibly imprinted upon him”, according to Baldwin, his faith community’s “naiveté about life appalled him and drove him away”. While Baldwin left behind the church of his youth, never to return, for the remainder of his writing career, the “backslidden” minister’s literary musings continued to be informed (in both style and content) by the formative religious tradition that he left behind. Though several studies have been undertaken that examine Baldwin’s significance to various aspects of the study of African-American religion and culture, precious little has been written regarding Baldwin’s continuing engagement of the idiom of African-American preaching, the idiom which cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson has nominated as the “jewel in the crown of Black Sacred Rhetoric”. While many studies of Baldwin include the fact that Baldwin was a preacher’s son and that Baldwin himself preached for a time during his youth, the account is yet to be given of how Baldwin’s writings continued to employ the rhythms, grammar, tones, and textures of the Black sacred rhetorical tradition, especially from beyond the borders of the African-American church. This essay seeks to expose not only how Baldwin self-consciously continued to stand in the rhetorical trajectory of the African-American preaching tradition, but the attempt is also to reveal how the writer secularizes the idiom, providing the Black Holiness preacher a hearing from beyond the church. Through a focus on Baldwin as a Black sacred rhetorician, sermonizing from beyond the church, this essay participates in the nearly 100-year-old conversation instigated by the early African-American literary and cultural critic James Weldon Johnson in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), regarding the neglected significance of the sermon and the preacher in African-American literature and Black expressive cultures. Baldwin’s sermonic is here examined as a highly distinctive mode of Black public theologizing.

Third Cohort Begins Unique Ph.D. Program in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric

Third Cohort Begins Unique Ph.D. Program in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric

Croft Sr, Wayne E.. The Motif of Hope in African American Preaching during Slavery and the Post–Civil War Era: There’s a Bright Side Somewhere. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. xvi+158 pp. $90.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsCroft Sr, Wayne E.. The Motif of Hope in African American Preaching during Slavery and the Post–Civil War Era: There’s a Bright Side Somewhere. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. xvi+158 pp. $90.00 (cloth).Kit ShieldsKit ShieldsChicago, Illinois. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 101, Number 1January 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711497 Views: 35Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

FROM AN OUTCAST TO THE PROPHET: THE EVOLUTION OF MALCOLM X’S RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

The figure of the radical African-American preacher Malcolm X has always occupied and continues to occupy a special place in the history of the protest movement of the 1960s. This is due to a number of reasons, the main of which was the pronounced ambivalence and inconsistency of the political philosophy of this public figure, who was noted for both ultra-radical religious sermons and rather progressive revolutionary and national liberation ideas at the final stage of his life. The latter, in fact, made him one of the main characters of the “rebellious decade”. While the far-right radicalism of the Harlem preacher faded into the background and began to be perceived as some “mistakes and misconceptions” that were later rethought and overcome. The question of assessing the legacy and personality of Malcolm X has always caused a lot of controversy. On the one hand, his contribution to the development of the movement of the struggle of the Black population for their rights and the formation of the African-American mentality is undeniable; on the other — it can be said that in the academic environment for all this time they practically were not subjected to critical reflection. If, during his lifetime, the ideas of the Harlem preacher were perceived by the vast majority of Americans as frankly marginal, then after his tragic death in 1965, Malcolm X became one of the most popular and iconic figures in recent US history. Any criticism of him began to be perceived extremely painfully. In this article, the author tried to trace the process of formation and evolution of the ideological and political views of Malcolm X, which was the main goal of the study. The main difference from other works on this topic was that in this article, this phenomenon is considered in dynamics, the causes of transformations and the influence of related factors are noted. At the same time, the author tried to identify certain “variables and constants” of the religious and political philosophy of Malcolm X, not only fixing them, but assessing the degree and depth of changes. That led to rather unexpected conclusions on a number of issues, the main of which was the explanation of the reasons for the incredible popularity of Malcolm X in modern American society. The main method of research is materialistic dialectics, which allows considering the political philosophy of Malcolm X in dynamics in accordance with the principle of historicism. Special attention is paid to the issues of radicalism, the transformation of ideological and political views and attitudes to religion, the debunking of myths, stereotypical and hyperbolized ideas about this figure, and the key milestones of his biography. As for the specific historical methods, the historical-genetic and historical-typological approaches are used in this work.

Rhythmic Flesh: How the Regulation of Bodily Rhythm Contributes to Spirituality in the Jesus Prayer, Medieval Dance, and African American Preaching

AbstractRecent scholarship on the concept of flesh in Christianity points to the body’s susceptibility to change and influence from material phenomena as well as from social and discursive forces. But what are the processes by which such forces shape the body? This article argues, by analyzing three Christian practices from distinctive contexts—the Hesychast Jesus Prayer, medieval liturgical dance, and African American preaching—that rhythm is a key to understanding these processes. Each practice forms a body capable of connecting with spiritual forces by leveraging the body’s material rhythms and their symbolic associations through a process called entrainment in relation to a particular social context. The analysis of each practice, therefore, contributes to our understanding of how material and nonmaterial factors work together in the process of religious formation by uncovering the ways in which rhythm connects both dimensions.

Wayne E. Croft, Sr., The Motif of Hope in African American Preaching during Slavery and the Post-Civil War Era: There’s a Bright Side Somewhere

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Pauli Murray: In & Out of the Pulpit

This keynote address was delivered on August 6, 2018 at Societas Homiletica at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and explores the relationship between preaching and identity. The lecture introduces Pauli Murray, a local saint whose activism, writings, and ministry challenged the church and broader society. After a detailed introduction, I consider three principal influences on Pauli’s voice: Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and James H. Cone. Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, Pauli’s maternal grandmother, provided a lens for thinking about the ethical and spatial contexts in which sermons arise. Langston Hughes, a fêted poet and author, offered literary inspiration and a model for moving among different genres. James Cone, a path-breaking scholar, gave Pauli vital theological footing and a framework for linking preaching, identity, and activism. Overall, I argue that Pauli Murray makes a singular contribution to the study of African American preaching.

Intimidation Was the Program: The Alleged Attempt to Lynch H. Seb Doyle, the “Rhetoric of Corruption,” and Disfranchisement

AbstractIn 1892, H. Seb Doyle, an African American preacher, learned that Democrats sought to lynch him due to his support of Populist Congressman Tom Watson. Was the threat real? This question became the center of a campaign discussion of race, politics, and corruption. Democratic and Populist newspapers’ accounts of this issue reveal the role of the “rhetoric of corruption” in the Georgia Populist Party's campaigns in the 1890s. Ironically, Populists used the same rhetoric Democrats had used against Republicans during Reconstruction. Populists linked Democratic political and economic malfeasance with the racial “corruptions” of miscegenation and “Negro Domination.” Although the Populists attempted to make this link, their insistence on black and white political equality undermined their white supremacist rhetoric, thereby weakening their case. Despite the Populists’ failure, the ultimate result was the same: the Populists came to abandon biracial politics and called for greater disfranchisement, all in the name of reform.

Ethnicity and the Pragmatic Strategies in American Christian Sermons

This study is concerned with the pragmatic aspects in American Christian sermons by White-American and African-American preachers. The study aims at detecting the noticeable differences between preachers in terms of the pragmatic strategies and tracing the social variable of ethnicity. The data under scrutiny are selected from official websites in forms of videos transcribed by the researchers and then analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The two types of analysis help the study to arrive at a variety of conclusions, the most central of which is there are considerable differences between the White-American and African-American preachers regarding their use of the pragmatic strategies. It also concludes that the social variable of ethnicity affects the African-American preachers more than their counterpart.

In the Vestibule of Another World

Expressing the real is an arduous job. During her travels in South Carolina during the 1870s, the African American preacher Charlotte S. Riley was asked on two different occasions to confirm that she was “a real woman.” The first time, following one of her sermons, a white stranger approached and began inspecting her. When asked why he did so, the stranger replied that he was investigating whether she was “a real woman or an angel.” Apparently satisfied that she was not an apparition, he declared that “The world is coming to an end, for I never seen this before, but I see it to-night.” The second time, a woman from the congregation that she had just addressed approached to explain that her white employer instructed her to “look at your fingers and see is you a real woman” (Riley 66). Riley describes both incidents without commentary in her 1902 memoir, and it is impossible to know precisely what provoked these questions about her ontological status, but both speculations upon her body suggest something about her work and its cultural context: a female former slave often in poor health who could engage large audiences, she cut an improbable figure, and the question of not who but what she was, her interrogators apparently believed, could be worked out by examining her physical person. These moments show how easily a fascination with her sermon became a fixation on her body and how potentially limiting her audience’s expectations could be. For these strangers, Riley’s body seemed an unlikely source for such a voice, leading to their fixation on her flesh. Skin, as in Frantz Fanon’s famous visual schema, becomes the site of racialized subjectivity, where the black self is fixed by the white other’s gaze “the same way you fix a preparation with dye” (89). The strangers’ disbelief belongs to a much larger history of the representational burden placed upon black cultural production and the bodies of its producers—the burden to both appear representative and express authenticity.

Authors’ Response

Authors’ Response

Preacherly Texts: Zora Neale Hurston and the Homiletics of Literature

Abstract Zora Neale Hurston called African American preachers “the first artists” and understood their sermons as foundational to Black expressive culture. This essay reads closely in Hurston's anthropological writing on preachers and preaching (especially in “The Sanctified Church” and Mules and Men) to codify certain semiotic principles of preaching that then provide a critical lens for discerning “preacherly” elements of three novels by Hurston: Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Moses, Man of the Mountain. Rather than a simple textualization of oral craft, Hurston's novels reflect (diversely, and with varying degrees of success) complex “transcultural recirculations” among European, African, and American cultural elements that careful attention to Hurston's homiletics of literature draw out. These readings amplify Hurston's status as an original religious thinker—an element of her career that scholars frequently avoid or gloss over.

Fire This Time: James Baldwin, Futurity, and a Call and Response

This article explores the relationship of Afrofuturism and the liberation and transformative form of African American preaching, as well as the intersections of religious styling and performance, particularly “call and response.” I explore that, as the concept of Afrofuturism continues to take shape, it expands to encompass African religiosity, mythology and cosmology, including also African religious thought, myths and rituals. Even more so, it in turn inspires religious language, discourse and stylings of African and African American peoples through the African American sermon and preacher. As such, this article explores scholar James H. Harris's liberation and transformative theology with the work of James Baldwin and his essay, “Letter to My Nephew.” In addition, I establish Baldwin as a futuristic prophet calling for radical change, liberation and the transformation of Black life from the margins of oppression, and into the center of power and enlightenment.

The Politics of Faith During the Civil War. By Timothy L. Wesley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 273 pp. $45.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Politics of Faith During the Civil War . By Timothy L. Wesley . Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press , 2013. xi + 273 pp. $45.00 cloth.Book Reviews NotesHistorians have devoted considerable attention to ministers during the American Civil War. More than three decades ago James H. Moorhead (American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants the Civil War, 1860-1869 [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978]) analyzed the millennial overtones in sermons of New England ministers. More recently, Harry S. Stout (Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War [New York: Viking, 2006]) depicted the northern clergy as kneejerk supporters of a war that oftentimes was conducted in an immoral, unchristian manner. In this fine volume, social historian Timothy Wesley maps out much underexplored territory by examining the impact of ministers' words deeds the multifaceted responses to these utterances actions by the laity, denominational leaders, military civil authorities, the secular press. He effectively shows how people inside outside the church manipulated or inhibited the political behavior of clergymen (7), in the process revealing rifts between ministers laypersons regarding the extent appropriateness of the politicization of the church confirming how religion politics were thoroughly blended during the war.One strength of Wesley's work is the geographic breadth of his ministerial coverage. Indeed, his careful attention to regional differences unique local conditions illuminates the diversity complexity of clerical experiences. For instance, he discusses northern clerics who unequivocally supported the Union; northern pastors who were accused of disloyalty for both sins of omission or commission; border state ministers who sometimes served divided congregations oftentimes clashed with either coreligionists or secular figures; clergymen in the occupied South who were arrested or exiled by officers; southern divines who defended the war effort promoted Confederate nationalism; African American preachers who championed moral self-improvement education as stepping stones along the path to freedom rights.Wesley's discussion of treason during the war is also instructive. He explains how most Northerners went beyond the constitutional definition of treason scrutinized a minister's words for signs of disloyalty. In fact, a clergyman need not commit an overt act against the government to be considered a traitor. Laypersons, newspaper editors, military authorities branded numerous preachers as disloyal for failing to pray for Abraham Lincoln, for refusing to give vocal support to the cause, or even for holding personal opinions (the open-ended allegation of sympathizing with the South) that called into question their loyalty to the United States. Although he recognizes that in many cases Republicans targeted Democratic pastors for purely partisan reasons, at times Wesley makes unsubstantiated claims about the extent of disloyalty in the northern pulpit. For example, at the beginning of chapter 3 he asserts, and still other clergymen, at least in sentiment if less often in deed, were openly disloyal to the Union (43). At the chapter's end he concludes, treacherous congregational pastors who sapped their congregants' commitment to the war effort were threats to the Union (58). …

Word and Worship: Let Talents and Tongues Employ: The Gift of Black African American Preaching

Word and Worship: Let Talents and Tongues Employ: The Gift of Black African American Preaching

I Believe I’ll Testify: The Art of African American Preaching by Cleophus J. LaRue

I Believe I’ll Testify: The Art of African American Preaching by Cleophus J. LaRue

African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago. By Dennis C. Dickerson. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010. xi + 236. $50.00 cloth; $50.00 e-book.

African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago. By Dennis C. Dickerson. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010. xi + 236. 50.00 e-book. - Volume 81 Issue 2

The Journey and Promise of African American Preaching

The Journey and Promise of African American Preaching