scholarly journals Defining a People

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tisa Wenger
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Dominant Society ◽  
Mission Movement

This chapter examines the varieties of religious freedom talk in African American history. It argues that the racial assemblages of the dominant white society severely limited the utility of religious freedom as a way to (re)define African American identity. It begins by showing how often religious freedom worked in support of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy; and how black church leaders rearticulated this freedom as one way to assert the full humanity of black people and to reposition themselves as fully modern, rational and moral modern subjects. The chapter goes on to argue that many of the new religious movements of black urban life—including Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, the Moorish Science Temple, and the Nation of Islam—used religious freedom talk in their efforts to redefine their communal identity away from the negative valences of blackness, either replacing race with religion or infusing their blackness with a new cosmic significance. But however they defined themselves, the dominant society denied their claims and overwhelmingly dismissed them as fraudulent and overly political rather than legitimately religious. For the vast majority of African Americans, religious freedom provided little escape from the confines of a racialized oppression.

"I Saw You Disappear with My Own Eyes": Hidden Transcripts of New York Black Israelite Bricolage

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob S. Dorman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Black Religion ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sunday Schools

To date, scholars have tended to view Black Israelites as mercenary, derivative, or imitative. However, this microhistorical reading of the public, partial, and hidden transcripts of New York Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew's beliefs and ritual practices demonstrates that Black Israelites did not simply imitate Jews, but rather they were bricoleurs who constructed a polycultural religion that creatively reworked threads from religious faiths, secret societies, and magical grimoires. Black Israelite religious identity was imagined and performed in sidewalk lectures and in Marcus Garvey's Liberty Hall; it was embodied through Caribbean pageants, and acted out in parades. Black Israelism was lived through secret Spiritualist and Kabbalistic rituals, and taught openly through Sunday Schools and Masonic affiliates. Finally, it was an identity that was formed and performed in a mixture of Sanctified and Judaic rites. Print culture, performance, and complex social networks were all important to the imagination and realization of this new Israelite religious identity. Recognizing the subversive quality of this bricolage and the complexity of its partial and hidden transcripts belies attempts to exclude esoteric African American new religious movements from the categories of protest religion and black religion. When one combines the study of Black Israelism with similar studies of African American NRM's of the 1920s, it is possible to appreciate a remarkable wave of overlapping esoteric religious creativity that accompanied the much more famous artistic creativity of the Harlem Renaissance.

Crossing Bar Lines

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gordon Williams ◽  
Robin D. G. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
Eminent Scholar ◽  
Musical Practices

This book provides an interpretive framework for understanding how African American creative improvisers think of musical space. Featuring a Foreword by eminent scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, this is the first critical improvisation studies book that uses Black Geographies theory to examine the spatial values of musical expression in the improvisational and compositional practices of trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill. Bar lines in this book serve as a notational and spatial metaphor for social constraints connected to systemic and structural white supremacy. Crossing them therefore applies not only to conceptions of Black spatiality in musical practices but also to how African American musicians address structural barriers to fight the social injustices that obstruct freedom and full citizenship for African Americans and other marginalized groups. Defined by both liminal and quotidian reality, Black musical space, like Black feminist thought, is about theorizing through the lived experiences of Black people which reflect different genders, sexual identities, political stances, across improvisational eras. Using this theory of Black musical space, the book explains how these dynamic musicians explicitly and implicitly articulate humanity through compositional and improvisational practices, some of which interface with contemporary social movements like Black Lives Matter. Consequently, Crossing Bar Lines not only fills a significant gap in the literature on African American, activist musical improvisation and contemporary social movements, but it gives the reader an understanding of the complexity of African American musical practices relative to fluid political identities and sensibilities.

The Twentieth-Century Black Church

2019 ◽  
pp. 216-240
Author(s):  
David D. Daniels
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Church ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Dissent

Religious dissent within the Black Church focuses on defending the Christian gospel against the alliance of Christianity and the race order of white supremacy marks the contribution of the Black Church to the wider dissenting tradition. It engages in the religious delegitimation of the dominant racial order. While the White Church in the United States has historically replicated the dominant racial order of African American subordination, the religious dissent of the Black Church has resisted and subverted the dominant racial order in a way in which grace pre-empts race in the functional ecclesiology of the Black Church with Christian egalitarianism affirming the equality of the races, envisioning a church where grace structures ecclesial life rather than racism.

scholarly journals ALIRAN SESAT DAN GERAKAN BARU KEAGAMAAN (Perspektif UU PNPS No. 1 Tahun 1965 dan Hak Asasi Manusia)

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Umi Sumbulah
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
New Order ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The Law

One typology of new religious movements in Indonesia based on the essence of teachings was the group which was considered heretical by the competent authorities, namely the Kingdom of God which led by Lia Aminuddin and al -Qiyadah al-Islamiyah led by Ahmad Moshadeq. Under Act No. PNPS 1 In 1965, the two groups were assessed deviant and criminal breaking so that the perpetrator was sentenced to a maximum of 5 years in prison. Considering the provisions contained in the ICCPR which has been ratified by Indonesia, where the law is contrary to the values of human rights which have been adopted in the constitution and legislation that produced the Reform Era. Legislation which is a product of the Old Order law has been used by New Order for restrictions and co-optation to the development of religious freedom and belief in Indonesia.

The Living Stations of the Cross

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Cressler
Keyword(s):  
Black Church ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Stations Of The Cross ◽  
Black Muslims ◽  
Death Of Jesus ◽  
The Cross

This chapter introduces “the Living Stations of the Cross,” a Black Catholic reenactment of the passion and death of Jesus performed annually by parishioners of Chicago’s largest Black Catholic church from 1937 to 1968. This devotional practice serves as a lens through which to better understand the ways in which Catholic ritual life and relationships distinguished Catholic converts from the Protestant churches proliferating around them in the midst of the Great Migrations. It argues that Black Catholics should be understood as sharing in the same impulse as other new religious movements or “religio-racial movements,” such as the Black Hebrews and Black Muslims, who adopted religious practices and bodily disciplines that marked them as different from the assorted Black evangelical practices that were quickly coming to be understood as normative for Black religious life (known by the shorthand “the Black Church”).

scholarly journals As for the control of religious freedom or the types of religious examination of new religious movements

2017 ◽  
pp. 137-141
Author(s):  
Vitaliy Solovyov
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religion And Law

When today the issues of control over religious freedom are raised, then the question immediately arises, in what plane should the problem considered here be. The concept of religious scholarly examination first appeared due to Tikhonravov Yu.V179. However, his analysis of primary sources found that such a procedure already existed in tsarist Russia as "spiritual expertise". And although AM Bobrishchev-Pushkin, describing the problems of this procedure, calls it a book in his book, then "spiritual examination", then - in another place - "religious examination", which is a bit strange for a lawyer, since jurisprudence requires a clear use of concepts, but here it is still said the possible existence of various types of religious scholarly examination. The question then arises: what are the reasons (criteria) to be put to allocate its species? To answer it, we need to find out what components make up the concept. Classically accepted consideration of the issue is to conduct in the plane of relations of religion and law, which gives rise to two types of control of religious freedom on the basis of "religious police" and "police religion".

Introduction: African American Religion Symposium

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-10
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
American Religion ◽  
African American Religion

This essay introduces five articles in a Nova Religio symposium focusing on African American Religion. The essays provide some means for re-imagining the study of African American religion in ways that allow for a much better understanding of African American participation in traditional and new religious movements.

scholarly journals The Obligation of White Women

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 1006-1019
Author(s):  
Sara Plummer ◽  
Jandel Crutchfield ◽  
Desiree Stepteau-Watson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Work ◽  
White Woman ◽  
White Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Bird Watching ◽  
Black Bodies

On Memorial Day 2020, a white woman, Amy Cooper, was walking her unleashed dog in New York City. After being apprised of the leash law in that state by a man bird watching, Ms. Cooper proceeded to call the police stating an “African American man” was “threatening her life and that of her dog” (Ransom, 2020). While this event may seem unconnected to the field of social work, it is a modern example of the way white women, including those in social work, use emotionality, bureaucracy, and the law to control Black bodies. Social work has been and continues to be, responsible for policies and practices that maintain white supremacy culture and criminalize Black people.

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