Baptist Church Research Articles

Mère Henriette Feller (1800-1868) of La Grande Ligne and Ordered Ministry in Canada

The history of ordination of women in Canada has various beginning points. The Rev. Lydia Gruchy of the United Church of Canada was the first woman ordained by a Canadian jurisdiction for Canadian ministry in 1936. In southern Ontario, Michigan Free Bapists ordained Jennie Johnson in 1909 for service in Chatham Township, Ontario. Similarly, Rev. Sister M.E. Johnson, spouse of the Rev. B. B. B. Johnson, pastor of the Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, Halifax, 1903-1905, exercised ministry with her husband and independent of him in the area around Halifax, Nova Scotia. These illustrations are all based on the assumed definition of ordained ministry as a reflection of order and ardour. However, as I previously written about when discussing the history of Baptist ordination, there has been a third component to the definition of ministry, namely that of function. Function carries within it an implicit rejection of a sacramental definition of ordination.

“But of Course He is Led by God”: Pastoral Influence on an HIV/AIDS Ministry

HIV/AIDS is spreading more rapidly in black communities than any other in the United States, with black women being 23 times more likely to become infected than any other subgroup in the country. Some African-American churches are becoming involved by creating HIV/AIDS ministries that cater to various needs of local populations. Through an examination of deictic markers, this article analyzes ideologies surrounding HIV/AIDS and the pastor's influence on the HIV/AIDS ministry at College Street Baptist Church.

Growing Up PK

Growing Up PK Anthony Aycock (bio) Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Preacher’s Daughter, by Elizabeth Emerson Hancock. Center Street Press, 2008, 288 pp., $9.99 (Kindle edition). Easter Everywhere, by Darcy Steinke. Bloomsbury, 2008, 240 pp., $14.95 (paper). Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, by Peter Manseau. Free Press, 2006, 416 pp., $15 (paper). A River Runs Through It, by Norman MacLean. University of Chicago Press, 2001, 239 pp., $12 (paper). The Preacher’s Boy, by Terry Pringle. Algonquin, 1988, 280 pp., $2.99 (Kindle edition). Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir of Growing Up, Coming Out, and Changing America’s Schools, by Kevin Jennings. Beacon, 2006, 267 pp., $9.99 (Kindle edition). If, as Samuel Johnson suggested, “Life’s a short summer, man a flower,” then Southern Baptist preachers’ sons are either daisies or Venus flytraps. I grew up a daisy. As the preacher’s kid, or PK, I was expected to fill whatever role the church needed me to play. In children’s choir, I sang solos. For Christmas plays, I was given the lead. Sunday-school teachers looked to me to explain biblical passages, as though they thought hermeneutics was hereditary. I even shoveled snow off the church steps. Kids at school would see me coming, cover their mouths, and say, “Oops! I can’t cuss around you.” In 2001, Jim Baker’s son, Jay, wrote Son of a Preacher Man, about growing up televangelist, but that is not the typical PK story. The typical story involves Mission Friends; youth retreats; Bible school; and spending Friday [End Page 175] nights in nursing homes, hospitals or the solemn, antiseptic houses of church members. It involves duty, discipline and weirding people out. (At my first job, when I was seventeen, the boss was a bastard to everyone except me. Later I heard it was because he feared going to hell.) Most important, it involves a commandment not just to honor your parents but to make sure that if the church ever asks them to leave, it is not because of you. Owing possibly to that commandment, few PKs have written about the experience. This essay will discuss six books—four memoirs and two novels—by and/or about PKs. The closest one to my experience is Elizabeth Emerson Hancock’s memoir Trespassers Will Be Baptized. Hancock and her sister, Meg, grew up in eastern Kentucky, where their father was the pastor of King’s Way Baptist Church. The book is more a confederation of funny tales—“Acid-Washed Samaritans,” “Bluegrass Ladies of Faith,” “Joseph and the McAlpin’s Bargain Basement Blazer”—than a narrative. Well, most reviewers found them funny. “It’s no exposé,” wrote one about Hancock’s style, “never snarky, mostly fond, and when she can’t be fond, she’s gentle.” I agree that her stories are fond. “It’s a refreshing read for folks who are tired of seeing faith equated with ignorance and hatred,” a reviewer wrote. “Refreshing”: right again. The problem is that refreshment is all Hancock goes for. One scene illustrates this. “One Sunday afternoon,” Hancock writes, “I’d been playing under the tall-back love seat in Daddy’s church study when I overheard Mrs. Pence.” Mrs. Pence has walked in to complain about a nursery worker using language that is “decidedly too adult.” After prodding the woman, Hancock’s father learns that the questionable language is “the F word.” At the sound of this, Hancock is all ears. She doesn’t know what the F-word is, specifically, “but I did know it existed, out there in the dangerous universe of things that made you a sinner just by hearing or seeing them.” (I laughed at this—the laughter of recognition.) Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Preacher’s Daughter Elizabeth Emerson Hancock. Center Street Press, 2008, 288 pp., $9.99 (Kindle edition). [End Page 176] ‘The F word?’ Daddy said, dropping his pencil in midsentence. ‘The F word. You’re sure about this?’” (Here, I did not laugh. The pencil-dropping is a dippy detail. My father has driven drunks to detox, preached...

Plenary Paper Discussant Commentary 2

A treatise that begins with the statement I am not a fan of country music, but I am a radio flipper, certainly gets my attention. Like the author, I am also not a big fan of country music (except for Dolly and Reba, who doesn’t love them)? Music reviews aside, Winders’ invocation of how country music lyrics illustrate competing nodes of diffusion that work to question geographical imaginations of southern ‘authenticity’ is truly fascinating. When it comes to the material and social changes in the southern landscape over the years, I have some firsthand experience. While attending graduate school at Florida State in Tallahassee, then getting my first teaching job at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, I would occasionally take long drives into the rural countryside, stopping along the way to stroll through the many small towns that dot the landscape. At least to this non-southerner, southern rural culture initially appeared permanently fixed in both time and space. In subsequent years, however, I began to notice some changes in these cultural nodes of rural southern life. The Baptist churches in these small towns, still very much iconographic symbols of AfricanAmerican and white vernacular southern culture, began sharing religious space with a Catholic church, built to accommodate the large numbers of Hispanic migrant laborers who work the farm fields. Signs that advertised we speak Spanish began appearing in the windows of the mom and pop stores along Main Street. Mexican restaurants suddenly appeared where the local country diners once stood. So in a rural context, I most certainly agree with Winders’ thesis of the changing nature of material, social and cultural spaces in the south. I was pleased to see Winders incorporate Doreen Massey and David Harvey’s theoretical lens of time-space compression into her narrative on ‘re-placing’ southern geographies. This is a fitting juxtaposition, where global capitalism has shrunk both space and time, and where old attachments to place and identity (in this case southern place and identity), are thrown into a maelstrom of multiple meanings. Her discussion of southern urban/rural dualities and those liminal spaces in between are particularly relevant here, as she correctly calls into question the false assertion of a ‘southern culture’. There are many different place-specific contingencies that give rise to the south’s geographical imagination, particularly when placed against a backdrop of racialized constructions of identity. Extending the discussion further, Winders’ invokes the extra-scalar implications of competing southern identities from the scale of the body, and the implications of otherness that goes along with bodily attributions, such as the ‘in

Crow Names, and: Dream Song, and: After Four Days of Rain the Sky Forgets

Crow Names, and: Dream Song, and: After Four Days of Rain the Sky Forgets Doug Ramspeck (bio) Crow Names After we tired of words there was dark and darker. A fine warm rain fell. You could hear them beyond the gabled roofs, beyond the open fields in the swales. Dusk became ash. No one tended to the cries and they grew louder, claiming the back roads past the railroad tracks, the bar ditches, rising from pokeweed, leatherleaf. Pressing through screen mesh, clinging to our clothes, following us down hallways. We gave names to this: disfigured creature, black moon, shape of mind. The sounds were stone and flesh, wound and feathers. Circling the yards then circling [End Page 87] back. Carrying the stink of wet compost, loam rain. Calling and calling to our scavenged bodies. Dream Song At dawn these birds are blackish and tangential, and the lightcomes in low from the field, unfathomable. There is a song the grass sings by holding still,that my wife sings by leaning against the windowsill, her arms crossed and occasional:here is the day that hasn't yet begun, that holds itself for this moment in abeyance. My neighbordescribes how when her child was born not alive she held him the way a pond bed holds its stagnantwaters, how everything becomes a form of statuary: to close your eyes and to feel the lengthof a held breath, that sense [End Page 88] that our lives are the space between our heartbeats,the instant before the eye blinks. Last year I bought a possum skull on eBay for a cover photofor a book, and I thought that I would connect it to rope to hang like a wind chime from a tree—life notimitating art but representing whatever our representations represent. The mother tells meshe dreams sometimes that her child begins squirming in her arms, that the doctorsbegin hovering around her, amazed, stunned by their mistake, and there is a momentinside that dream when they are too perplexed to rend the child from her arms to tend to him,when she herself has not yet come awake, an instant when the boy begins to open his mouthto cry his way into the world. [End Page 89] After Four Days of Rain the Sky Forgets The crows of childhood have arrived above the river,landing in the field to dig up new shoots of corn, perching as dark fire in the paper birches. As boyswe heard them calling out of their bodies, saw their fallen feathers black as prophecy in the grass,imagined their orange eyes watching my brother rubbing salt into my ankles, the leeches that clungthere foaming blood then letting go. We are useless in this: the birds slip in and out of years the way raindrips without memory from the leaves. We slept beneath stars, drifted in our father's rowboat in muddywaters, floated on our backs and let the current carry us. The crows rowed above my father wipinghis face with a handkerchief in the field, rowed above my mother and aunt attaching a rope to a possumskull so that it became a soundless wind chime dangling from a hickory, rowed past the school busappearing at the fork in the road by the First Baptist Church of Grace, rowed above the ambulance turningone summer evening into the gravel drive, rowed past the train tracks where the lovers parked their carsand looked through windshields at a moon listing placid and inhuman in a sky. The heartbeat of a crowdrums and thrashes in flight, and the birds perch as grief [End Page 90] on the shoulders of evening, huddled through thesefour days of rain moving across the body of the earth. When I shut my eyes, the crows remember meswimming underwater by the cattails, talking to the old woman who rented the apartment aboveour garage, a woman who dressed herself in wool, even in summer, and ventured down the stairs onlyfor funerals. I believe the crows have returned now to their own bodies, that the sky bleeds into them...

Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866 (review)

Reviewed by: Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866 Swithin Wilmot (bio) Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866. By Gale L. Kenny. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Pp. Xi, 257. $44.95 cloth; $24.95 paper) Protestant missionaries are an important ingredient of the history of Jamaica in the nineteenth century, both during enslavement and after emancipation in 1834. Yet the work of male and female white [End Page 477] American Congregationalists linked with the American Missionary Association (AMA) is neglected in the accounts of the period. Happily, Gale Kenny's Contentious Liberties fills this gap in the historiography. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, the work provides a window into the varied experiences of the AMA missionaries in Jamaica in the first thirty years after slavery. The well-considered work also underscores the value of studying antislavery movements within transnational contexts. Kenny deftly analyzes the American background which inspired Oberlin's first graduates of "farmers-turned-missionaries" to establish a "civilizing" mission in Jamaica after 1839. Much influenced by their experience and context, they came to the island with notions of black independence and self-governance, constructed on black landownership and undergirded by Christian families reinforced by the church and the school. However, like the white English Protestant missionaries who had come to the island during the late period of enslavement, the American Congregationalists' expansive expectations were gradually eroded as African cultural retentions in the Creole society of Jamaica undermined their strict and inflexible religious discipline. Neither did the blacks share the missionaries' restrictive notions of female domesticity, since black women's economic activity contributed significantly to the survival strategies of families after slavery. Furthermore, the AMA church stations had to confront the ever-present rivalry of the black Native Baptist churches whose practices accommodated the more relaxed attitudes towards informal sexual unions of the indigenous culture of the island, the use of alcoholic spirits, and other personal habits that were anathema to the "purist" AMA missionaries. Indeed, by the early 1860s, the American missionaries were at one with other white missionaries on the island who expressed great disappointment at the survival of what they described as "superstitious heathenism" that was manifest during the religious revival that swept Jamaica at the time. In contrast to the early Oberlin enthusiasts who wanted to demonstrate by way of the Jamaican experience that emancipation for the United States of America would be successful, [End Page 478] AMA missionaries in the later period no longer focused on "manly independence," and instead emphasized that the blacks were "passive people, eager for white oversight" (p. 195). It is, therefore, not surprising that the AMA missionaries condemned the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865 when the blacks in St. Thomas in the east rose up against injustice in the courts, the denial of their civil rights, and systematic obstacles to black landownership. The unsympathetic missionaries blamed the Native Baptists, their main religious rivals, for the outbreak, supported its ruthless suppression, and welcomed the introduction of crown-colony government that snuffed out embryonic black politics in Jamaica. The irony, of course, was that all this was at the precise time that Radical Reconstruction looked to black enfranchisement to consolidate emancipation in the South against a recalcitrant white majority. However, the AMA missionaries, despite republican sensibilities, were convinced by 1866 that the predominantly black population of Jamaica was incapable of self-government and therefore believed that British authoritarian rule was required for the success of the challenging task of "civilizing" Jamaican freedpeople and their descendants. Gale Kenny's balanced work provides fresh insights into how black Jamaicans engaged with white mission churches in the post-slavery period. It is clear that the promotion of self-reliance and independence in church matters in the early period of the AMA mission empowered black members and trustees who exerted influence over which persons received the call to become pastors, as well as which missionaries had possession of church property. The AMA mission structure then provided opportunities for freed blacks to assert leadership that was often denied them in the larger society. [End Page 479] Swithin Wilmot Swithin Wilmot, a senior lecturer in history at the...

A instalação da Igreja Batista de Corumbá e da Associação Evangélica Batista de Mato Grosso

This article approaches the establishment of the Baptist Church in Corumba and the creation of the Evangelical Baptist Association of Mato Grosso from 1910 until 1940. In order to contextualize this particular process in Brazilian society, we present facts which marked the arrival of the first Protestant in the State. The 1910s is characterized by the arrival of the first Protestant Baptists, who later founded the Baptist Church of Corumba. It was a time of contrast involving faith, because of the predominance of the Catholic Church and several other religions which sought to establish in the society of Corumba and Mato Grosso in general. This period of struggle for land was extended until the 1940s. At that time, the State of Mato Grosso faced a major expansion of Protestant missionary work, especially Baptists, when was founded the Evangelical Baptist Association of Mato Grosso, which sought to unite the Baptist churches in order to strength the evangelization in the country of Mato Grosso.

A global introduction to Baptist churches

Introduction Part I. Foundations: 1. The primal shaping processes of the global Baptist movement Part II. Age of Emerging Baptist Denominational Traditions, 1600-1792: 2. Seeds for diversity amid an early Anglo prevalence Part III. The Frontier Age, 1792-1890: 3. Baptists' frontier age in the British Empire 4. Baptists' frontier age in the United States 5. Baptists' frontier age in the European continent, Africa, Asia, and Latin America Part IV. The Age of Proliferating Traditioning Sources, 1890-Present: 6. Baptists' evolving traditioning sources in Africa, Asia, and Oceania 7. Baptists' evolving traditioning sources in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Eurasia 8. Baptists' evolving traditioning sources in North America Part V. Beliefs and Practices: 9. Baptists' beliefs and practices.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works , Vol. 12: Berlin: 1932–1933 (review)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 12: Berlin: 1932-1933. English Edition, edited by Larry L. Rasmussen and translated by Isabel Best and David Higgins; supplementary material translated by Douglas W Stott. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2009. Pp. xxii, 680. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-800-68312-2.) Dietrich Bonhoeffer occupies a rare place in history. For example, he was one of the few Christians in Germany never charmed by any portion of what Hitler offered to the beleaguered German people. He, along with the rest of his family, recognized from the start what is acknowleged today- that this regime did not protect but violated moral values. He also occupies a rare place in history as a martyr, executed in April 1945 and now remembered, for example, at Westminster Abbey, where his statue is one of ten in a row of modern martyrs newly placed over the west entrance. Bonhoeffer also occupies a relatively rare place in publishing, with sixteen thick volumes of his complete works offered to readers of English, thirteen of them now complete. This represents a project of the International Bonhoeffer Society, undertaken to make available in English the sixteen volumes completed in German by 1998. Bonhoeffer is well worth the trouble, on two counts. His life story is one of Christian courage and ethical acumen in response to Hitler and the Holocaust. Nazi horrors were perpetrated by a Christian nation with an extraordinary list of cultural accomplishments. Bonhoeffer's rare voice in opposition- including, finally, participation in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler- has an important place in the history of that period. Additionally, Bonhoeffer's writings increasingly became available and grew in stature during the postwar period, so that he now ranks among the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. Volume 12 is of special interest, since it represents a crucial year, starting three months before the rise of Hitler. Born in 1906, Bonhoeffer was only in his mid-twenties at the time, but he had packed many accomplishments into his tender years. He completed his doctorate by age twenty-one and his second dissertation, the German Habilitation, at age twenty-four. He then spent 1930-31 at Union Theological Seminary in New York, befriending Reinhold Niebuhr and learning to know and respect the African American experience of worship at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in neighboring Harlem. Bonhoeffer began lecturing at the University of Berlin in 1931 at age twenty-five; this volume tells us much about his ideas, his students, and his unique approach to the trade of the German professor. …

Psychiatric emergency “surge capacity” following acts of terrorism and mass violence with high media impact: what is required?

ObjectiveAdequate preparedness for acts of terrorism and mass violence requires a thorough understanding of the postdisaster mental health needs of all exposed groups, including those watching such events from a distance. This study examined emergency psychiatric treatment-seeking patterns following media exposure to four national terrorist or mass casualty events. MethodAn event was selected for study if (a) it precipitated local front-page headlines for >5 consecutive days and (b) emergency service psychiatrists identified it as specifically precipitating help-seeking in the study hospital. Four events qualified: the Oklahoma City bombing (1995), the Columbine High School (1999) and Wedgewood Baptist Church (1999) shootings and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Time-series analyses were used to correct for autocorrelation in visit patterns during the postdisaster week, and equivalent time periods from years before and after each event were used as control years. ResultsOverall, disaster week census did not differ significantly from predisaster weeks, although 3-day nonsignificant decreases in visit rate were observed following each disaster. Treatment-seeking for anxiety-related issues showed a nonsignificant increase following each disaster, which became significant in the “all disaster” model (t=5.17; P=.006). Intensity of media coverage did not impact rate of help-seeking in any analysis. ConclusionsAlthough these sentinel US disasters varied in scope, method, geographic proximity to the study site, perpetrator characteristics, public response, sequelae and degree of media coverage, the extent to which they impacted emergency department treatment-seeking was minimal. Geographically distant mass violence and disaster events of the type and scope studied here may require only minimal mental health “surge capacity” in the days following the event.

Constructing Membership Identity through Language and Social Interaction: The Case of African American Children at Faith Missionary Baptist Church

In this article, the author explores how African American children in a Black church Sunday school community in northern California developed positive membership identity. Focal participants were Sunday school children ages 9 to 12 and their Sunday school teachers. Drawn from a two‐year ethnographic study, data showed that adults prepared children for membership through an interactive framework of instruction, which also formed the base for communicative competence in the setting. The author describes this framework and offers new insight into conditions that give rise to African American student success. [African American children, church, identity, communicative competence]

True Love Waits: Do Southern Baptists? Premarital Sexual Behavior Among Newly Married Southern Baptist Sunday School Students

This study measures premarital sex prevalence, sources of sex education, and support for secular sex education among 151 newly married young adults surveyed at 9 Texas Southern Baptist churches. More than 70% of respondents reported having had premarital vaginal or oral sex, but more than 80% regretted premarital sex. The proportion of premarital sex exceeded 80% in 6 of 9 churches, among men and women married after age 25 and women married before age 21. School sex education was the only source of information about sexually transmitted infections for 57% of respondents, and 65% supported secular sex education despite church opposition.

THE PROGRESS MOVEMENT AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: THE ZION NON-PROFIT CHARITABLE TRUST

One of America's greatest leaders arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1950 to begin what would become one of the nation's most successful community development initiatives, the Movement. Born in Charleston, West Virginia, on 16 October 1922, the young Rev. Leon Howard Sullivan spent time as assistant pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, under the leadership of Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and in East Orange, New Jersey, as pastor of the First Baptist Church before coming to Philadelphia. When the 28-year-old minister accepted the position as pastor of Zion Baptist Church, the first hint of his audacity and forward thinking was when he asked the church's board of deacons to pay on his behalf a $100 membership fee for the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. One deacon who was on the board at the time recalled how stunned the board members were at this request. When asked about it, Sullivan responded, Chamber of Commerce has advance knowledge of major economic trends, and membership would allow me to take immediate action on actions potentially beneficial to the congregation and our people. Thus from the beginning Rev. Sullivan was considered an unusual preacher. Indeed, several years ago one preacher confided to this writer that initially he did not respect Sullivan's approach because hardly heard him preach about Jesus in his sermons, it was always about money and economics. Today, that preacher is a convert and has incorporated Sullivan's economic approach in his ministry. One might ask: Why did Rev. Leon Sullivan concentrate on economics as the basis for African Americans realizing full citizenship, along with civil and political rights? Sullivan himself traced this particular concern to the sermon he delivered to his congregation on 15 June 1962. One day I preached a sermon at Zion Baptist about Jesus feeding the five thousand with a few loaves and a few fishes. Everybody put in their little bit and you had enough to feed everybody with some left over. So I said, that is what I am going to do with the church and the community. I said, am going to ask 50 people to put $10 down for 36 months of loaves and fishes and see if we could accumulate resources enough to build something that we would own ourselves. (1) The response was overwhelming and over 200 families joined the plan that Sunday morning and that was the beginning of the that formed the basis of his far-reaching community economic development programs. The funds contributed to the 10-36 Plan accumulated rapidly and Sullivan launched Zion Investment Associates (ZIA), which after 1977 was renamed the Investment Associates, a for-profit corporation that would undertake income-generating projects. At the end of thirty-six months, subscribers would receive shares of the common stock and would be entitled to participate in yearly shareholders' meetings. Given the lack of access to adequate housing in Philadelphia's racially divided neighborhoods, in 1964 ZIA's first investment was in an apartment complex. This was the beginning of the Progress Movement in Philadelphia. It was followed by the building of Zion Gardens, a middle income apartment complex in North Philadelphia. Financed by ZIA with assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a loan from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), this $1 million project was completed in 1966. The next project funded by ZIA through funds generated from the investors in the 10-36 Plan was the building of a shopping center in North Philadelphia, Progress Plaza. Working with the Philadelphia Council for Community Development (PCCD), a private group focused on economic development, and the Philadelphia Recovery Authority, a municipal department, Sullivan was able to obtain prime land on Broad Street, near Temple University. To get the project started, the ZIA went to the local branch of First Pennsylvania Bank to seek out a construction loan. …

Ontario Baptists and the War of 1812

This paper examines both the impact of the War of 1812 on the Baptist churches in Ontario, as well as on the response of Baptists to the war. To be sure, the war had wrought devastation upon Upper Canadian churches, and Baptist churches were no exception in this regard. All Baptists were isolated from their American colleagues, friends, and support. Upper Canadian Baptists had suffered even more through the ignominy of disloyal pastors, and the closure of churches. There may have been a purging of Americans from the Methodists of Upper Canada, but there does not seem to be the same happening among the Baptists. No doubt the desperate need among Upper Canadian Baptists for American help was a factor in this willingness to have American missionaries return. The most passionate loyalty expressed in the evidence that remains was a cross-border ecumenism that speaks to the power of the evangelical impulse. Once the war ended, the churches could quickly reopen relations and get back to the work of the church.

Finds in the Tower of the St. John the Baptist Church, Écija (Seville): the recovery of a building

RESUMEN El presente artículo trata de explicar, con el ejemplo de los hallazgos en la Restauración de la Torre de San Juan Bautista de Écija, la dificultad de establecer límites precisos entre Restauración-Rehabilitación-Intervención. También se señala el conocimiento de la historia, la importancia de la intuición y el rigor del dibujo como herramientas del proyecto. Se analiza e indaga muy someramente sobre el concepto de torre desde sus proporciones y formas hasta conceptos más abstractos como comunicación y poder y se pone de manifiesto que el desconocido espacio interior de la torre, tiene igual valor o más que el que se reconoce en el concepto primario de su término. Con todo esto, se quiere demostrar que con las pequeñas decisiones del proyecto una vez ejecutadas, se consigue dar a la obra un valor nuevo y enfatizar en ella la idea original que la construye.SUMMARY This article aims to explain, with the example of the finds in the Restoration of the Tower of St. John the Baptist Church in Écija, the difficulty of establishing exact boundaries between Restoration-Rehabilitation-Intervention. Also, the knowledge of history, the importance of intuition and rigor in design are pointed out as tools of the project. It analyzes and very briefly explores the tower concept from its proportions and shapes to more abstract concepts such as communication and power, and shows that the unknown interior of the tower is of equal or greater value than that recognized in the primary concept of its conclusion. With all of this it is hoped to demonstrate that the small decisions of the project, once implemented, will give the work new value and emphasize the original idea that built it.

“THE LION OF ZION”: LEON H. SULLIVAN AND THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE: INTRODUCTION

Previous articleNext article No Access“THE LION OF ZION”: LEON H. SULLIVAN AND THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE: INTRODUCTIONV. P. FranklinV. P. Franklin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 96, Number 1Winter 2011 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.1.0039 Views: 22Total views on this site Copyright 2011 ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Anger and Compassion on the Picket Line: Ethnography and Emotion in the Study of Westboro Baptist Church

Feminist ethnographic methods stress the role of empathy for research subjects and researchers’ willingness for their work to be useful to their subjects. When the research subjects are “unloved groups,” though—people whose actions or beliefs are hateful or harmful—some ethnographers argue that such empathy and empowerment is misplaced or leads to uncritical scholarship. In this reflection on the author’s ethnographic study of Westboro Baptist Church, a small Kansas-based congregation infamous for preaching its anti-gay theology at funerals, including the funerals of fallen servicemen and -women, she questions the usefulness of denying an emotional connection with “hatemongers.” Instead, she argues for compassion for both the victims and, more challengingly, the perpetrators of hate in order to protect researchers from the threat of desensitization.

African-American Voices of Traditional Sacred Music in Twentieth-Century and Twenty-first Century Los Angeles

��� Over a span of some 390 years, the African diaspora has developed a rich musical heritage within the United States, generating several important genres that have been nurtured throughout the country by numerous musicians who were introduced to the foundations of the music in the church and through school experiences of their childhood. This heritage, rooted originally in the southern United States, has been transported to California. A number of blacks who became the musicians (performers, teachers, composers, and scholars) of Los Angeles arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from states (e.g., Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Maryland) that had strong African-American communities suffused with the musical culture of the African diaspora. Their migration transformed the spiritual, gospel music, blues, and jazz in California (see DjeDje and Meadows 1998) while concurrently cultivating an appreciation for and an expertise in the performance of traditional European classical music. A s new musicians visited and/or permanently settled, they began to nurture the talent of those who were native to the state. John A. Gray came from Norfolk, Virginia, and opened the Gray Conservatory of Music. William T. Wilkins came from Little Rock, Arkansas, and started the Wilkins Piano Academy (opened in 1912 as the first Interracial School of Music in the City of Los Angeles). As explained by Irma Jean Juniel Prescott, a Zion Hill Baptist Church musician from Shreveport, Louisiana, who became a Los Angeles–community piano teacher, “Those individuals who are quali

CHARITY AND CONFLICT

PURPOSE: To discover how the lives of a small Baptist Church and its individual members were influenced by royal, governmental and denominational events and decisions through more than three centuries from the English Civil War to the 1993 Charities Act.

AMANDLA! THE SULLIVAN PRINCIPLES AND THE BATTLE TO END APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1975-1987

Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, pastor emeritus Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, was present in New York City when United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan formally introduced the Global Principles of Social Responsibility (GSP) at special session at the UN headquarters on 2 November 1999. Like the original Sullivan the Global Principles constituted voluntary code of conduct for business activities, and over 120 companies, including most signatories to the original Principles, endorsed Kofi Annan's initiative. essence, the GSP restated the original objectives of the Principles while broadening their applicability beyond the Republic of South Africa and modifying them to reflect contemporary challenges of globalization on the eve of the 21st century. initiative declared: The objectives of the Global Principles are to support economic, social, and political justice by companies where they do business; to support human rights and to encourage equal opportunity at all levels of employment, including and gender diversity on decision-making committees and boards; to train and advance disadvantaged workers for technical, supervisory, and management opportunities; and to assist with greater tolerance and understanding among peoples; thereby, helping to improve the quality of life for communities, workers, and children with dignity and equality. (1) original Principles, corporate code of conduct formally announced in 1977 by Rev. Sullivan, became focal point of debate about U.S. foreign policy and the behavior of multinational corporations during the heyday of the struggle against apartheid laws calling for the separate development of designated racial groups in South Rev. fully intended the principles to serve as catalyst for ending apartheid, and the Soweto rebellion beginning in June 1976 provided an important impetus for their development. (2) This uprising, led by black South African students opposed to the requirement that instruction in public and private schools be conducted in the Afrikaans language, also ushered in the first major phase of the divestment movement on U.S. college campuses. Student activists were calling on university officials to end investments in U.S. corporations operating in South Ironically, suspicion was aroused among anti-apartheid activists by the timing of the announcement of the Principles, and their quick adoption by U.S. businesses and universities to justify maintaining their investment policies. (3) Rev. Leon H. received national and international attention in 1971 when he became the first African American appointed to the Board of Directors of General Motors Corporation, the largest automobile manufacturing company in the world. origin of Sullivan's initiative can be traced to tour of African nations in June 1975 when he was asked by anti-apartheid activists to take on the issue of South African apartheid. He issued public statement in September 1975 describing the basic operating approach that would become associated with the principles, representing a concerted double effort on the part of the government of the United States, and American based businesses [to change] operating [practices] in ... South Africa. (4) statement outlined what would later become the formal set of principles and expressed support for passage of the resolution submitted to the U.S. Congress by Congressman Charles Diggs of Detroit: In the spirit of the Diggs Resolution dated April 22, 1975, businesses operating in South Africa that fail to comply with such equal fair employment practices, and equal opportunity provisions, should have all United States government contracts ... cancelled, terminated, or suspended absolutely, or their continuance conditioned upon an accepted program by the United States government of compliance along these lines. …