Dear Research Network, Colleagues and Friends,
This wonderful conference is a gift! In it, you will hear from renowned scholars Tracey Hucks (Harvard Divinity School), Anthea Butler (University of Pennsylvania), Lerone Martin (Stanford University) and Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton University). Hucks specializes in womanist ethics, Butler in African American religious history, Martin in Black Church Studies, and Weisenfeld in African American religious movements. Their insights take listeners beyond the US to Pan-African concepts of religion which provide a rich resource for Black religious epistemologies.
The panel centers on the seminal work of legendary scholar Rev. Dr. Albert J. Raboteau, known for his pioneering book Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (1978) which illuminated the rich religious world created by enslaved Africans. His research underscores connections between various African diasporic spiritual traditions and foregrounds the centrality of faith practices to survival, resistance and identity formation under slavery’s dehumanizing grip. Raboteau’s paradigm-shifting scholarship paved the way for fields like Africana religions, womanist theology and black liberation theology to flourish.
Engaging the Pan-African dimensions of Raboteau’s work can bridge conversations between these disciplines and ethnic groups within the African Diaspora around shared yet diverse experiences of oppression and faith. As Raboteau’s career demonstrates, rendering the invisible visible has powerful reverberations across time and space.
Please click here to watch the wonderful panel discussion on the work of Albert J. Raboteau.
Resources
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, University of North Carolina Press, 2021
Butler, Anthea. Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World, University of North Carolina Press, 2007
Martin, Lerone. Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion, New York University Press, 2014
Raboteau, Albert J. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History, Beacon Press, 1996
Weisenfeld, Judith. New World a-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration, New York University Press, 2017
Weisenfeld, Judith. African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black Ywca, 1905-1945, Harvard University Press, 2014
Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network 