Zion Church Research Articles

A Comedian in the Pulpit: Empowering the Use of Humor in Preaching

Each week, the preacher mounts the pulpit with many tools to deliver an impactful sermon. One element of preaching that the black church should embrace is humor. Humor and preaching may appear strange bedfellows, but humor is embedded in the art of black preaching. This study explores humor within the confines of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

Abstract P252: Financial Strain and Cardiovascular Health Among Young Black Women: Findings From a Community Survey

Background: Black women experience disproportionate rates of cardiovascular disease (CVD), including earlier onset, increased number of risk factors, and higher morbidity rates. Higher levels of stress may help to explain this disparity. We sought to examine the relationship between financial strain—a common stressor—and cardiovascular health in a sample of young, Black women. Methods: We performed a cross-sectional analysis of data collected through an academic-community collaboration with the AME Zion Church. In 2019, an electronic survey was administered to self-identified Black women aged 18 to 40 years. The survey assessed psychosocial stressors, psychological distress, healthcare utilization, and health status. We examined the association of financial strain—defined as difficulty in paying for necessities—and cardiovascular health (CVH) modeled after the American Heart Association’s “Life’s Essential 8”. The eight domains were defined by four behavioral health factors (sleep, diet, physical activity, and smoking) and four self-reported health conditions (overweight/obesity, prediabetes/diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol). Each component earned 1 point for positive attributes (e.g., adequate sleep) or 0 for negative attributes (e.g., having high blood pressure). Components were summed to a total score (range: 0-8). We used multivariable regression to examine the relationship between financial strain and CVH score adjusting for other sociodemographic factors. Results: This study included 160 Black women with a mean age of 32.36 (SD = 5.68). Nearly half the sample (46%) held graduate or professional degrees, and 28% of respondents earned an income ≥$100,000. The mean score on the 8-point CVH measurement was 5.45 (SD=1.44). Adjusting for age, education, and income, experiencing some financial strain was associated with poorer CVH than little to no financial strain (β = -0.72, p=.006). Age was marginally associated with decreasing CVH (β=-.040, p=0.05). Evaluating individual CVH components, those with some degree of financial strain had higher odds of being sedentary (OR: 2.29; 95% CI: 1.04, 5.04) and getting insufficient sleep (OR: 2.66; 95% CI: 1.17, 6.05) than those with little to no strain. There were no significant associations between financial strain and diet or the health status measures (i.e., overweight/obesity, prediabetes/diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol). Smoking could not be evaluated separately due to low numbers of smokers within the sample. Conclusion: Adjusting for age, education, and income, financial strain was negatively associated with overall CVH, and physical activity and sleep, specifically, within this sample of young, Black women. Interventions targeting financial strain may positively affect preventative CVH behaviors within this population.

Prophecy Narrative in the Zion Church Age in the Context of Judeo-Christian Eschatology

Prophecy Narrative in the Zion Church Age in the Context of Judeo-Christian Eschatology

TANGGAP COVID – 19 MASYARAKAT DI RT TENGKAN KELUARAHAN MAKALE KABUPATEN TANA TORAJA TAHUN 2020

Corona virus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) is known to cause respiratory tract infections in humans ranging from colds to more serious coughs such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The spread of the COVID-19 virus is increasing faster through droplets of saliva or out of the nose when an infected person coughs or sneezes.(Prasetyo and Suherlan 2020) However, there is still very little community in RT Tengkan, Lamunan Village, Makale District, Tana Toraja implementing health protocols to avoid the spread of the corona virus. Therefore, there is a need for an understanding of the health protocol for handling COVID-19. Based on these problems, the authors carry out community service through the STIK Makassar Response COVID-19 Real Work Lecture (KKN) activities carried out using methods of supporting public safety against COVID-19. Such as making banners about health protocols, building hand washing stations, distributing masks to break the chain of distribution of viurs, and working together to clean up the environment by applying physical distancing. Hopefully with this program the community can comply with health protocols.
 As a result of this activity, I managed to distribute 20 masks to people who often leave their homes, put up health protocol banners around people's homes, build hand washing stations around Lamunan Village, and invite people to work together to clean the road to the Zion church by implementing health protocols.

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

Reviewed by: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight L. Diane Barnes (bio) Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. By David W. Blight. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Pp. 888. Cloth, $37.50.) David W. Blight dons his public intellectual hat in this long-awaited new biography of Frederick Douglass, one of the nineteenth century's most important human rights activists. The first major biography of Douglass [End Page 642] in more than a generation, Blight's book was ten years in the making, and well worth the wait. The last major Douglass biography, William S. McFeely's Frederick Douglass (1991), overreached in interpretation and introduced a host of minor and unnecessary inaccuracies into the canon of Douglass scholarship. Blight's volume adds to other recent works in providing a major corrective to the historiography dominated by McFeely and others who relied almost exclusively on Douglass's own writings, especially his three autobiographies. This mellifluous biography joins Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (2017), by Leigh Fought, and The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016), a close read of Douglass's own words by Robert Levine, to demonstrate that there is still much to learn about the Lion of Anacostia. By incorporating the copious correspondence surrounding Douglass's circle of reformers, friends, family, and even critics, Blight and other recent Douglass scholars are opening a new window into the life and experiences of this oft-studied American. Blight's hefty volume offers a considerate portrayal of Douglass's "life and times," contextualizing his familiar life story in the larger history of the century in which he lived. In so doing, it brings Douglass's story to life in a way that will appeal to both scholars and general readers. With a sometimes-flourishing writing style, Blight moves readers into Douglass's world and lets them walk through his years as a slave in Maryland, as a free man, and as a famous orator and reformer. When necessary, Blight deviates from the biographical narrative to explain the larger scope of nineteenth-century history, which will be useful for general readers. For example, he details just how Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation led to the formation of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment and Douglass's role as a recruiter of black troops, and later offers a rundown of the power struggle between Andrew Johnson and Congress in the early days of Reconstruction. Blight envisions Douglass as a prophet of freedom, and throughout the book he places more emphasis on the great man's connection to religion and Christianity than previous scholars have allowed. Yet this seems to work more as an organizing device than as an actual argument guiding the biography. Douglass maintained an association with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and at one point acted as a lay preacher, but Blight uses Douglass's command of the text and parables of the King James Bible to provide an organizing thread. Beyond pointing out Douglass's frequent use of Bible quotes and allusions in his speeches and writings, however, Blight offers little convincing analysis to contradict received scholarship on Douglass's tangential connection to organized religion throughout most of his adult life. Indeed, for Douglass, scripture was one of many literary [End Page 643] canons in his repertoire. Douglass quoted an amazing range of literature, including works by Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Alexander Dumas, and others familiar to his nineteenth-century audiences and readers, yet Blight gives those influences almost no attention. Tracing the full narrative of Douglass's life and immersion in the annals of nineteenth-century American history, the first two-thirds of Blight's book forms a comfortable retelling of the great man's life familiar to scholars. But in the last third of the book, which corresponds to Douglass's post–Civil War experiences, Blight's unique access to a treasure trove of privately held materials affords him a means to offer a new telling of the last decades of Douglass's life. His access to Walter O. Evans's private collection of family-created scrapbooks and correspondence allows Blight to comment newly on the postwar relationships between Douglass and his growing extended family of children and their...

Creating a Zion Church

Creating a Zion Church

“The Negro's Peculiar Work”: Jim Crow and Black Discourses on US Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1877–1900

In 1887, T. Thomas Fortune published an editorial, “The Negro's Peculiar Work,” in the black newspaper theNew York Freeman, wherein he reflected on a recent keynote speech delivered by Reverend J. C. Price on 3 January in Columbia, South Carolina, to commemorate Emancipation Day. Price, a member of the Zion Wesley Institute of the AME Zion Church, hailed from North Carolina and his denomination considered him to be “the most popular and eloquent Negro of the present generation.” On the occasion meant to reflect on the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation (which went into effect on 1 January 1863) for present-day African Americans, Price turned his gaze away from the US towards Africa. In his speech “The American Negro, His Future, and His Peculiar Work” Price declared that African Americans had a duty to redeem Africans and help them take back their continent from the Europeans who had partitioned it in 1884–85. He railed,The whites found gold, diamonds, and other riches in Africa. Why should not the Negro? Africa is their country. They should claim it: they should go to Africa, civilize those Negroes, raise them morally, and by education show them how to obtain wealth which is in their own country, and take the grand continent as their own.Price's “Black Man's Burden” projected American blacks as agents of capitalism, civilization, and Christianity in Africa. Moreover, Price suggested that African American suffering under slavery, failed Reconstruction, and Jim Crow placed them in a unique position to combat imperialism. He was not alone in seeing parallels between the conditions of “Negroes” on both sides of the Atlantic. Many African Americans, Afro-Canadians, and West Indians saw imperialism in Africa as operating according to Jim Crow logic: white Europeans would subordinate and segregate Africans, while economically exploiting their labor to bring wealth to Europe.

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County

Black Rural Lives Matters: Ethnographic Research about an Anti‐Racist Interfaith Organization in the U.S. South

AbstractThe non‐indictment of Michael Brown's killer in fall 2014, the castigation of Blacks during the Baltimore uprising following Freddie Gray's death in police custody, and the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail further solidified the notion of the expendability of Black life in the United States. But while larger urban areas like Cleveland, Ferguson, and Staten Island mobilized around anti‐Black police brutality, African Americans in smaller rural towns struggled to manifest their opposition to anti‐Black violence in ways that were meaningful to their communities. Many turned to the Black church, which emerged once again as a site of struggle and resistance. This essay charts the rise of an anti‐racist, interfaith organization created to combat anti‐Black racism in the South: Blount County United (BCU) organized by Reverend Dr. Willa Estell, head pastor of Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Maryville, Tennessee. Our focus on BCU renders problems that Blacks face in non‐urban contexts visible and demonstrates the systemic nature of racism in the 21st century as it is articulated in rural contexts thereby highlighting the hidden transcripts of anti‐Black violence.

The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters by Jennifer A. Williamson

Reviewed by: The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters by Jennifer A. Williamson John Saillant The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters. By Jennifer A. Williamson. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016, 337 pages, $39.95 Paper. Jermain Wesley Loguen lived a remarkable life. Born Jarm, a slave, in Tennessee around 1814, he escaped to the North and settled in mid-state New York, although he crossed the border into Canada several times. He began reading and writing, then he preached in a number of different churches. He is now associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church although his religious interests were wide ranging and his affiliation to the A.M.E.Z. Church developed late in his life. He was an energetic abolitionist speaker as well as an incisive commentator on American religion. In a published exchange with his former mistress, he denied the justice of enslavement and he refused to buy his own freedom. His free energies were focused on mid-state New York. He facilitated the Underground Railroad in countless ways, and he participated in the famous 1851 "Jerry rescue" in Syracuse, in which a number of residents, black and white, defied the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and battled officials holding the runaway William "Jerry" McHenry. Like Frederick Douglass, he recruited young black men for service in the Civil War. After the War, in the last few years of his life, he traveled between Pennsylvania and New York and he sought to establish A.M.E.Z. congregations in Kentucky and Tennessee. Like Jeremiah Sanderson, he turned his attention to black life in the western United States. But he died, in 1872, in Saratoga Springs, before he could go west. His 1859 memoir is the story of his life from childhood to the repercussions of the Jerry rescue. Loguen was indicted but never tried for his role in the rescue. His memoir plays an important role in scholarship on the rhetoric and artistry of black abolitionist writing ("novelization" studies), and it should function as a model text for black voices in state history in education. This new edition contains an appendix with a selection of Loguen's correspondence. For readers of the early twenty-first century, the parts of The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, that are most likely to be of interest [End Page 302] are his novelistic account of running away and his detailed immersion in abolitionist life in New York. As a runaway, abolitionist, and Underground Railroad conductor, he set foot in Rochester, Utica, Whitesboro, Bath, Ithaca, Cortland, Troy, and Syracuse. These were important places at important moments in New York history. When New York history is taught in schools or colleges, it is crucial that students encounter black voices in local contexts. And when teachers and researchers educated in New York institutions relocate, as they sometimes do, to other states, it is crucial that they transfer this insight—that black-authored texts are a crucial part of state history—to their new environments. Once we have models of black voices at local levels, we find them all around us. In other words, "state history" should be a transferable skill in the American educational landscape. With authors like Loguen, we sharpen the skills we need to transfer, in the case at hand, from New York to other states. Williamson's "critical introduction" offers an engaging approach to the 1859 memoir. She notes his connection with Frederick Douglass, both in abolitionist activism and in the rhetoric of manliness. She enters the debate over whether it was Loguen or a white abolitionist who wrote the memoir. That debate intersects with commentary on authenticity. Using contextual evidence, Williamson concludes that Loguen was the author even if he hired a white abolitionist associate to edit the manuscript. Unfortunately, the handwritten manuscript does not, as far as we know, exist. Williamson also situates Loguen's memoir in the process of abolitionist-minded "novelization," the way in which nineteenth-century black-authored autobiographies borrowed from the...

Seeking Biomedical and Traditional Treatment is a Spiritual Lapse Among Zionists: A Case Study of the Zion Church in Malawi

The Enabling Universal and Equitable Access to Healthcare for Vulnerable People in Resource Poor Settings in Africa (Equitable) Project was conducted in Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, and the Sudan between 2009 and 2012. It was aimed at determining the challenges which vulnerable groups, such as persons with disabilities, experience when accessing health care. It also aimed at identifying non-users of health services at the community level and reasons why they were not accessing these services. The study found that members of the Zion Church do not seek treatment from public or private health facilities, or from traditional healers. Not much has been written about how members of the Zion Church in Malawi seek health care. This paper explores how members of the Zion Church seek health care during illness episodes. The study was conducted in four districts in Malawi. A total of twenty-five members and non-members of this church were interviewed to determine how they sought health care. The study found that members of the Zion Church do not use Western medicine: the church does not allow them to seek treatment either from Western health facilities or traditional healers, otherwise they risk excommunication. Senior members of the church pray for the sick, and patients also seek treatment from the Zion Church clinic, where prayers, blessed water, and amulets are used in the treatment of diseases. Non-members who seek treatment from the Zion Church Clinic are advised to first seek treatment from traditional healers and health facilities. The Zion Church clinic should be the last resort for these non-member patients, most of whom have been sick for a long time. After being cured, some of the non-members have been converted and joined the church. Our conclusion is that while medical pluralism exists in Malawian communities, members of the Zion Church only access treatment from their church elders and church clinics. They do not use Western medicine.

Where it Was

Where it Was Jean Ross Justice (bio) Childhood Mysterious moments sometimes occurredAfter great rains. OnceA snake hung looped from a branchNear the pasture stream.The ditches ran with yellow waterFoaming at drop-offs. OnceAt sundown,The sun came out so low, so searching,It sent us scurryingTo give dead insects decent burial,Set playhouses in order. Where it Was for Nathaniel, Ross, and Heather Go south on the old highway,Turn toward Mt. Zion Church and the river,Bump over the railroad track at the top of the hill,Woods on the left,Another mile and a half or maybe two,But well before the crossroads,Over to the right, set backIs where Great-Grandpa Thompson’s house once stood.My mother pointed toward it when we passed.A graveled yard, a well, a frame house,Barn, crib, pigpen—The usual. The wife and mother died;He married her widowed sister. [End Page 589] A big family, coming and going,Their stories mostly lost, the place remembered.Who else still living now knows where it was?I alone have lingered here to tell thee. Go toward Cottonville,Past the small church, over the creek bridge,Two miles on, perhaps, where the trees end,Look left, up a slight rise—It’s where Zack Wallace used to live.Lived with his second wife, her children (his all dead),Sometimes his single grandchild, Grandpa Ross.Lived there, got drunk,Harbored a fugitive slave as best he could,Jumped in the pond one night to quiet the frogs,His hair “white as a goose,” my father said.Who else still living now knows where it was?I alone have lingered here to tell thee. [End Page 590] Jean Ross Justice Jean Ross Justice died in Iowa City last March at the age of ninety-one. Copyright © 2016 Jean Ross Justice

Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker (review)

Reviewed by: Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker Daniel Walker Howe Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North. By Steve Longenecker. (New York: Fordham University Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 246. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8232-5519-1.) Steve Longenecker clearly loves the subject he writes about here, and the reader benefits accordingly. He treats the religious life of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the years immediately before, during, and after the great battle that made the small town famous. Gettysburg religious life—or rather lives, for diversity is emphasized—displayed remarkable variety, and Longenecker treats every denomination he covers with interest and respect. Each of the varieties of Gettysburg Christianity was represented by a single congregation. (There was no synagogue.) The records of these parish churches form a substantial part of the sources for this study. The author also delves into the histories of individual families and persons, enabling him to alternate between chapters describing general developments and brief divertimenti focused on particular individuals, usually obscure, often with poignant stories. He points out that Gettysburg had many immigrants and children of immigrants, so that ethnic differences often compounded religious ones. The most conspicuous development identified by Longenecker among the mainstream evangelical Protestant churches—Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran—is their gradual religious “refinement,” a response to the growing prosperity of the middle class in Victorian times. This refinement took such forms as more expensive physical plants and clerical training, pipe organs, choirs, and Sunday schools. But much of the author’s interest lies in the denominations that were not exactly mainstream. Among Gettysburg’s various denominations were the Roman Catholics, most of them German by birth or ancestry. Longenecker describes them as “on the edges of the mainstream” (p. 87). He goes on to describe the distinctive qualities of Catholic religion that put them on that edge, including emphasis on sacraments, [End Page 955] devotions, use of Latin, and especially authoritarianism rather than republicanism. He goes on to discuss antebellum anti-Catholicism and the Know-Nothing political party, which drew support from both the major parties, Whigs and Democrats, of that era. He illustrates both Catholic and anti-Catholic opinion from sermons and the printed media. But in the end, he concludes that the most remarkable thing about Gettysburg Catholicism was the degree of toleration it received from the Protestant majority. The absence of antislavery in American Catholicism he attributes to Catholic reluctance to jeopardize this measure of tolerance by supporting an unpopular cause. Other denominations outside the Gettysburg mainstream included the Dunkers and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church—both ethnic denominations, for the Dunkers were overwhelmingly German. Dunkers got the name from their practice of immersion baptism, in which the convert was dunked three times for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Faithful to the simplicity of early Christianity, they remained resolutely aloof from the growing refinement of mainline evangelical churches. They practiced feet-washing to affirm the equality of all members—although Longenecker notes that some white Dunkers shrank from kissing black converts after washing their feet. The AME Zion parish, small and impoverished, nevertheless provided local blacks with a supportive religious community. But it took a big hit when the great battle came to Gettysburg. Many of its members fled the area, fearful of the invading Confederate soldiers, who would capture and enslave black people they found, even those legally free. The refugees did not necessarily return to Gettysburg afterward; yet the church somehow reconstituted itself and survived into postwar times. Longenecker has produced a beautifully written book, beginning with its charming introduction. He finds Gettysburg interesting not only for its own sake but also as reflecting its region, “the Lower North.” More broadly, he also finds Gettysburg an example of the United States as a whole and of the process of modernization, which Gettysburg illustrates on an intimate scale. But while using local history to illustrate broad themes, such as the process of middle-class refinement, the author retains his interest in the idiosyncratic and individual. Longenecker has written a democratic history from the ground up and deserves our congratulations...

Wesleyan Identity in Black Methodist Perspective: A Historical and Constructive Theological Conversation

This article presents the history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, describes its contribution to and involvement in the civil right movement in the US in the fiftieth and sixtieth of the 20 th century, and introduces to the respective bibliography and discussion among social scientists and historians.

Serving New York's Black City

It is in the community life of a great city that the library has its most challenging opportunity. The more homogeneous such a life the greater is the opportunity of becoming part of it, since all currents flow together, drawing one into the common whirl of experience while conflicting currents of thought and habit keep one tossing about on the surface. One of the most interesting and least-known of such communities is New York's black city, extending approximately from Eighth Avenue to the Harlem River and from 130th to 150th Streets. Picture to yourselves a great town of some 150,000 black people, with a few alien whites as scattered shop-keepers, and old residents, clinging to their homes. This city has its own churches, its theaters, its newspapers, its clubs and social life. There are three churches, each with a parish numbering more than two thousand, in Harlem and at least thirty others, varying in size. The Sunday School of Mother Zion Church has a membership roll of seven hundred, and an average attendance of five hundred. All denominations, from Baptist to Episcopalian, are represented; there are a large Catholic parish, several Jewish churches, and a number of Eastern and African sects. The theaters have their own colored actors, and increasingly one sees posters featuring colored artists. There are colored Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A., the latter with an entire resident apartment house. In Liberty Hall, Harlem's town hall, of a Sunday, immense mass meetings are held. Does white New York know what is discussed there? Harlem supports six colored newspapers recognized as representing negro thought, as well as a number of lesser sheets. This negro world is swarming with clubs, societies, organizations of sorts, for the support of religious or political movements, as for instance, the Bahai faith, or Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa propaganda, as likewise for the mutual betterment or advancement of members. What gives all this point is the fact that these activities are sponsored and managed, to a large extent, by colored people. The offices of the Urban League are filled by negroes, although both races are represented on the national board of directors. The colored branches of the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. are managed entirely by colored people. The newspaper editors are negroes, and represent negro thought exclusively. The clergy are negroes, except in the case of the Catholic parish. On the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue a bank has just been erected, which is financed by colored capital, and is under colored control. A large new theater also financed by negro funds is being erected. The reading world knows of Marcus Garvey and his Black Star steamship line. Increasingly, real estate is coming under black control. Even the police and fire stations have colored men on their forces, although the city-managed activities within the district are the most reluctant in succumbing to the inevitable tide. Until a few months ago the library had no colored assistants. Of the three public schools in this community two have colored teachers, one has fourteen on a teaching force of sixty-one, the other has only one. In this school, which faces the library on 135th Street, the registration is something over twenty-one hundred, of whom two thousand are colored. The community has also its literary and artistic life. Several artists of real worth work in Harlem, and there is a large music school, the colored director of which has given recitals at Carnegie Hall. All this seems to spell homogeneity Yet though this great group is held together by the tie of color, and by the same bond is separated from its white neighbors, within itself it is crossed and divided by many conflicting lines of thought, belief and hope. The most deeply-cut is that of nationality. Nearly half this population is foreign, from the British or Spanish West Indies or South America. From the British West Indies comes an educated, thinking and ambitious group, interpenetrated by white blood, unused to the color line and inexpressibly galled by it. …

Sylvan Cemetery: Architecture, Art & Landscape at Woodlawn at The Miriam, Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery

522 Exhibition Review Sylvan Cemetery: Architecture, Art & Landscape at Woodlawn at The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University Exhibition on view through November 1, 2014 Review by Debra Jackson Cemeteries are remarkably rich sources of archival material. Obviously the records must account for the who, when, and where regarding burials, but cemetery files are much more expansive and include maps, accounting and ledger books, and other documents which, taken together, produce a fascinating perspective on a particular life, death, or even a place. A recent search for the grave of abolitionist newspaperman Robert Hamilton (1819–1870) took this reviewer to Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where I discovered not only the grave but also the names of those buried with him. Robert Hamilton died a pauper; he was interred in a plot for indigents on land purchased at Cypress Hills by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, Mother Zion, of which Hamilton was a member. Cypress Hills Cemetery was a creation of the antebellum years and, as such, predates Woodlawn by several decades. Like Woodlawn, Cypress Hills grew out of the “rural” cemetery movement in the United States, and of necessity was planned and laid out in a location—for Woodlawn, this was the Bronx—far beyond the island of Manhattan, where the population had increased to the extent that burials on the island were outlawed after the 1830s. In 1863, a group of wealthy businessmen led by the Reverend Absalom Peters founded Woodlawn. In the years following the Civil War, cemetery design in the United States continued to be influenced by and developed according to European conventions, and these ideas initially determined the development of the Woodlawn landscape. The most decisive influence came from the Exhibition Review 523 Prussian-born Adolph Strauch, whose new cemetery style called the “landscape lawn” plan was embraced by Woodlawn’s trustees. As the exhibition catalogue indicates, Woodlawn became fashionable, and enjoyed a “golden age of patronage and artistic quality” in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression. The wealthy financiers of the Gilded Age invested large amounts, and seemed to compete with one another in the outlay of expense, as they actively worked to shape and frame the way they would be remembered. The roster of architects, sculptors, and landscape designers is a veritable “Who’s Who” of the artistic milieu and as a result, Woodlawn’s “memorials represent the largest and finest collection of funerary art in the country.” Sylvan Cemetery: Architecture, Art & Landscape at Woodlawn utilizes maps, photographs, letters, architectural drawings, and decorative objects to tell the story of Woodlawn’s beginnings and its evolution through the decades to the present. Organized thematically, the exhibition consists of five galleries, each displaying objects that support a corresponding theme: Shaping the Cemetery Landscape, Memorial Art and Mausoleum Architecture, Woodlawn’s Foundations, Architectural Inspirations and finally, Memorialists. The exhibition’s curators—Charles D. Warren, Susan Olsen, and Janet Parks—have selected items from the collection now on deposit in Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library that highlight examples of the funerary magnificence to be found at Woodlawn and that illustrate the richness of its archives. The archival material conveys equal power and vitality, along with the decorative objects, in the unfolding of the Woodlawn narrative. One feels compelled to linger over the object cases to fully absorb the details of each careful display. The exhibit has a measured, unhurried quality. The first gallery’s theme, Shaping the Cemetery Landscape, underscores the aesthetic development of Woodlawn in the display of Macy Gate, ca. 1875, a work that represented an undesirable element that was condemned—as noted in the label text—by landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. In a burst of caustic wit, Downing ridiculed the use of gates as “ironmongery” because of the way they sectioned off plots and the landscape. The “landscape lawn” plan “promoted the appearance of a continuous lawn, unbroken by divisions.” Also the first gallery includes an Insurance Policy Ticket from the 1870s 524 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY issued by the Railway Passengers Assurance Company, a small object but one that demands close consideration. The non-transferrable, twenty cent policy was purchased by R.E...

Self-Reported Use Of Traditional, Complementary And Over-The-Counter Medicines By Hiv-Infected Patients On Antiretroviral Therapy In Pretoria, South Africa

Current management of HIV involves the use of conventional prescription medicines, called 'antiretroviral drugs' (ARV), over-the-counter (OTC), complementary and alternative medicines (CAM), as well as African traditional medicine (ATM). The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of use of traditional, complementary and over-the-counter medicines. A cross-sectional survey of HIV-infected patients who started ART between July 2004 and August 2005 at Dr George Mukhari Hospital (Pretoria), who consented to be interviewed, was conducted. Using a pre-tested structured questionnaire, data were collected by two trained interviewers on sociodemographic characteristics, and on non-prescribed medicines used of three sources: African traditional medicine (ATM), complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and over-the-counter (OTC) medicines. The 180 patients who consented to be interviewed had a mean age of 36.7 (+/-8.1) years old; 68.8% were female, 86.7% unemployed, 73.9% with high school level of education, 77.8% single. Some 8.9% of respondents used at least one non-prescribed medicine. In descending order, 4.4% of respondents used ATM, 3.3% CAM, and 1.7% OTC medicines. The ATM products used included unspecified traditional mixtures, and those made of the African potato (Hypoxis hemerocallidea), and coconut (Cocos nucifera); OTC products used were paracetamol and sennosides (Senokot) tablets as well as a soap containing triclosan 1.5%; CAM products used were "sex booster" capsules of unknown composition, mercury-containing soaps (Mekako), and the Zion Church of Christ special tea, a mixture of Rooibos tea (Aspalathus linearis) plus sunflower oil (Helianthus annuus) and prayed for. In conclusion, only 8.9% of HIV-infected patients on ART in this study used a limited range of over-the-counter products as well as those from traditional, complementary and alternative medicine practices.

The American Religious Experience: A Concise History (review)

Reviewed by: The American Religious Experience: A Concise History Edwin S. Gaustad The American Religious Experience: A Concise History. By Lynn Bridgers. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group. 2006. Pp. vii, 254. $65.00 clothbound; $22.95 paperback.) The paperbound edition of this book is clearly intended for classroom use and should do well in that setting. It is, to be sure, "a concise history," and could be even more concise if repetitions, especially in the early chapters, were eliminated. Also, for the sake of concision, digressions into immigration history and world religions could be eliminated or abbreviated, as well as biographical sketches that divert attention from the main topic. In most of the chapters, the author is reluctant to stand as her own authority. She takes cover under the word "considered," for example, the Bay Psalm Book is "considered the first book of any kind printed on American soil" (p. 17), or John Wesley "often considered the founder of the Methodists" (p. 23). In one brief paragraph (p. 23), the word "considered appears four times. The author needs to pronounce and defend her own judgments. After some early chapters devoted largely to colonial America, the author follows a topical outline that moves much closer to the present. She gives fair treatment to the Amish and the Mennonites, for example, as well as the Quakers and Shakers. In Chapter 8, "Bacon, Swedenborg, and Transcendental-ism," she provides more attention to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir than one might normally expect. Chapter 9 offers excellent treatment of anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century, but stops short of the twentieth, thereby missing such fine opportunities as Al Smith and John Kennedy. Chapter 10 on American Judaism, in contrast, does give ample attention to the twentieth century. A chapter on the transformation from established [End Page 700] Anglicanism to free market Episcopalianism is well done, though some attention to Jefferson's Statute on Religious Freedom (1786) would have helped explain the necessity of this transition. Chapter 11 on "Lutherans, Germans, and Scandinavians" follows as best one can the many divisions in that denominational family based on ethnicity, theology, language, or geography, or some combination thereof. The author addresses the twentieth-century efforts to sharply reduce these many fragmentations. In the "Evolution of the Black Church" (Chapter 13), Professor Bridgers carefully describes the creation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1821. Unaccountably, however, she provides no comparable discussion of the much larger black Baptist bodies, the National Baptist Convention of the U.S.A. (1880), and a similarly named Convention organized in 1915. Chapter 14 focuses its attention more exclusively on "Baptists and Baptism," though again no significant attention is given to the black Baptists. Remaining chapters treat a wide array of subjects: Pentecostalism, Hispanics, Native Americans, Mormons, as well as Chinese and Japanese immigrants with accompanying religious affinities. Her final chapter, "Pluralism and Periphery," begins with welcome attention to William James and W. E. B. DuBois, then moves to reflections on unity and diversity, along with Americans' embrace of the practical over the abstract. "American religion," she writes, "demands a vibrancy that recognizes the importance of personal religious experience and creates channels through which the individual can share that religious experience with others" (p. 237). All of this provides much life and color to the "American religious landscape," to use one of the author's favorite phrases. Students should find here much to inform and entertain them. Edwin S. Gaustad University of California, Riverside (Emeritus) Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

The black church in America: African American Christian spirituality

Acknowledgements. Introduction: An Amphibious Worldview. 1. Emergence of What is African. African Warnings. What is African?. 2. The Particularity of African American Spirituality. 3. The Black Church in the Shadow of Slavery. The Scourge of Slavery. The Survival of Africanism. The Emergence of Black Denominations. 4. Communal Worship. The Controversy of Emotionalism. Spiritual Song and the Emergence of Black Denominations. African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. African American Baptists Churches. National Baptist Convention, USA. African American Pentecostalism. Black Worship. 5. Inviting Others to Be Black. African vs. Black: Dialectic Tension. James Cone and Desmond Tutu. African and Black: Communal Synthesis. 6. The Black Church as the Beloved Community. King's View: Prophecy and Nonviolence. African American Responses to King. King's Dream of the Beloved Community. Communal Antithesis for King. 7. Embodying African American Spirituality. A Churchless Black Church. A Womanless Black Church. The Full Embodiment of the Black Church. Timeline of the Black Church. Websites for Historic Black Denominations. Bibliography. Index

Historical Archaeology

Previous articleNext article FreeCurrent ApplicationsHistorical ArchaeologyE.R.WaymanE.R.Wayman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Seneca Village Project: Recovering New Yorks Lost PastSpeaking about an archaeological dig under way in Central Park, Nan Rothschild of Barnard College, codirector with Diana diZerega Wall of New Yorks City College and Cynthia Copeland of the New York Historical Society, says, Were interested in the normal archaeological and anthropological sets of questions that arise at any archaeological site. At the same time, she and her colleagues believe that their Seneca Village Project goes beyond the boundaries of academia, aiming to reshape New Yorks perception of its own history.Map of Seneca Village before the construction of New York's Central Park, showing the community's streets, houses, and fields. Indicated at right are the edges of city reservoirs.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointSeneca Village, as a mixed community of African American landowners and Irish immigrants, was not a typical nineteenthcentury New York City neighborhood. In 1825, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (known today as Mother AME Zion Church) bought the first land in what would become Seneca Village, and the community grew to include two other churches, including the citys still existent All Angels Church, and a school. When the city decided to create Central Park in the 1850s, it took the communitys land by eminent domain, displacing over 250 residents.Today the Seneca Village Project is seeking to rediscover this forgotten part of New Yorks past. Through archaeological and historical research, the projects codirectors hope to develop a clearer picture of what life was like in this settlement. During the summer of 2005 they explored the park with groundpenetrating radar, looking for the remains of buildings for possible future excavations. Preliminary results from this work also seem to indicate the presence of intact burials, according to Wall.How is this project going to get New Yorkers to rethink their history? Community interaction is a key factor, says Rothschild. This is a project in which weve made a real effort to include the community, the descendant community, she said. It has an advisory board that includes representatives from the communitys two original churches, the Mother AME Zion Church and All Angels church, that still exist in New York City today after their eviction from Seneca Village. The board helps determine the direction of the project (for example, suggesting the search for burials) and assists in its outreach programs. Cornell Edwards, a board member who represents the Mother AME Zion Church, which relocated to Harlem after being displaced from Seneca Village, explains the projects importance to the community: Its an educational program. We want people to be aware of the history to see that historys preserved. The project has held various public forums throughout the city. Edwards has found that his fellow New Yorkers are often surprised to learn about the community.This lack of awareness is not surprising. African American history is not well understood and often overlooked. The projects codirectors believe that their project has the potential to help correct this problem. Seneca Village represents the large black presence in the North, in New York, which is largely ignored [for this time period], said Wall. Most people are unaware that there were African American communities in New York before the early twentieth century. The project also raises the issue of slavery in the North. In fact, slaves in the state of New York were not completely emancipated until 1827two years after free African Americans founded Seneca Village.The inhabitants of Seneca Village valued their position as landowners because it gave them the right to vote. Rothschild, in fact, sees the settlement as a middleclass communitynot middleclass in jobs but in that they owned land. Walls historical research has shown that the children of Seneca Village received higher levels of education than African American children residing in other parts of the city.The codirectors would like to see Seneca Village and its inhabitants receive proper commemoration in Central Park, whether it is through markers or an exhibit. Such commemoration would provide balance to Central Park: visitors could gain a better understanding of the parks rich, complex history as well as appreciate its beautiful landscapes. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 2April 2006 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/503065 Views: 263Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.