Enslaved Africans brought their music and religion with them to America. They adapted their spiritual worldview into the Christian framework for survival. Sacred song was embedded with African spirituality and theology to create a religious experience that sustained African American people and became established forms of praise and worship.
Enslaved Africans brought their music and religion with them to America. They adapted their spiritual worldview into the existing Christian framework for survival. The God of the oppressor was transformed into the God of liberation and justice. Salvation became the conduit for survival. Sacred song was embedded with African spirituality and African American theology to create a religious experience from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century that sustained African American people and became established forms of praise and worship. The Civil Rights movement changed the religious reality of African American people. Sacred song in the twenty- first century has many challenges. Will the legacy and heritage of sacred song survive?
Black churches in America have long been recognized as the most independent, stable, and dominant institutions in black communities. In The Black Church in the African American Experience, based on a ten-year study, is the largest nongovernmental study of urban and rural churches ever undertaken and the first major field study on the subject since the 1930s. Drawing on interviews with more than 1,800 black clergy in both urban and rural settings, combined with a comprehensive historical overview of seven mainline black denominations, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya present an analysis of the Black Church as it relates to the history of African Americans and to contemporary black culture. In examining both the internal structure of the Church and the reactions of the Church to external, societal changes, the authors provide important insights into the Church’s relationship to politics, economics, women, youth, and music. Among other topics, Lincoln and Mamiya discuss the attitude of the clergy toward women pastors, the reaction of the Church to the civil rights movement, the attempts of the Church to involve young people, the impact of the black consciousness movement and Black Liberation Theology and clergy, and trends that will define the Black Church well into the next century. This study is complete with a comprehensive bibliography of literature on the black experience in religion. Funding for the ten-year survey was made possible by the Lilly Endowment and the Ford Foundation.
This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto represents the first detailed exploration of an African-Caribbean religion in the context of contemporary migration to Canada. Toronto is home to Canadas largest black population, a significant portion of which comprises Caribbean migrants and their descendants. This book shows how the development of the Spiritual Baptist religion in Canada has been shaped by the immigration experiences of church members, the large majority of whom are women, and it examines the ways in which religious experiences have mediated the members’ experiences of migration and everyday life in Canada. This Spot of Ground is based on a critical ethnography, with in-depth interviews and participant observations of church services and other ritual activities, including baptism and pilgrimage and field research in Trinidad that explores the transnational linkages with Spiritual Baptists there. The book addresses theoretical and methodological issues also, including the development of perspectives suitable for examining diasporic African religious and cultural expressions characterized by transnational migration, an emphasis on oral tradition as the repository of cultural history, and linguistic and cultural hybridity. This Spot of Ground contributes new information to the study of Caribbean religion and culture in the diaspora, providing a detailed examination of the significance of religion in the immigration process and identity and community formations of Caribbean people in Canada.
It is remarkable that African Americans, the descendants of slaves, embrace Christianity at all. The imagination that is necessary to parse biblical text and find within it a theology that speaks to their context is a testimony to their will to survive in a hostile land. Black religion embraces the cross and the narrative of Jesus as savior, both theologically and culturally. But this does not suggest that African Americans have not historically, and do not now, struggle with the reconciliation of the cross, black life, suffering. African Americans are well aware of the shared relationship of Christianity with the white oppressors of history. The religion that helped African Americans to survive is the religion that was instrumental in their near genocide.
In Inherit the Holy Mountain, historian Mark Stoll introduces us to the religious roots of the American environmental movement. Religion, he shows, provided environmentalists both with deeply-embedded moral and cultural ways of viewing the world and with content, direction, and tone for the causes they espoused. Stoll discovers that specific denominational origins corresponded with characteristic sets of ideas about nature and the environment as well as distinctive aesthetic reactions to nature, as can be seen in key works of art analyzed throughout the book. Stoll also provides insight into the possible future of environmentalism in the United States, concluding with an examination of the current religious scene and what it portends for the future. By debunking the supposed divide between religion and American environmentalism, Inherit the Holy Mountain opens up a fundamentally new narrative in environmental studies.
Hempton explores the rise of Methodism from its unpromising origins as a religious society within the Church of England in the 1730s to a major international religious movement by the 1880s.
This volume offers 37 original essays from leading scholars on the crucial topics, issues, methods, and resources for studying and teaching religion and the arts.
An initial introduction to the study of Christian theology is both exciting and invigorating for students of its discipline. One can become enameled in the classic perspectives of theology without any consideration of a possible alternative. Defining Salvation in the Context of Black Theology is an exit from the classic conviction that trumpets the doctrine of soteriology attributing its substance to the posture of eternity while ignoring the importance of salvation in the existential. Careful not to reject the question of eternal life, but examining the nuances of the term salvation empowers this work to present the like manner essential that having salvation is just as much about now than it is in the here after.
Anointed to Sing the Gospel is the biography of the "Father of Gospel Music," Dr. Thomas A. Dorsey from Villa Rica, GA to Chicago, IL. It encompasses the spiritual dilemma that caused him to cross-over completely to the gospel song from blues and jazz. The impact of Thomas A. Dorsey as a modern-day Levite and his impact on music of the 20th and 21st century Levites is examined. Interviews with contemporaries and devotees of Thomas A. Dorsey are included.